When contributing RP Jeff Smith, a state senator representing St. Louis, found himself behind bars for political missteps, he discovered a unique business world churning in prisons.
He saw that a meager prisoner’s salary quickly leads to ingenuity. You have to figure out how to get what you want without much money. What Smith saw on the inside struck him as very similar to business leaders he had come in contact with outside of the penitentiary.
He’s been released and has landed a job teaching at the New School. One of his crusades is to figure out a way to harness the ingenuity he experienced behind bars and getting ex-cons back on their feet with a business plan.
Jeremy Gregg works with the same population that Smith found so underutilized and inspiring. Gregg is the chief development officer of the Prison Entrepreneurship Program, where inmates take classes on how to build a business.
Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Daily Circuit” discussed harnessing prison ingenuity to get ex-cons on their feet.
Guests
Jeff Smith: Assistant professor of urban policy analysis and management at the New School
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Feb 28, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
Fascinating piece in this week’s The New Republic about how the brilliant Netflix series “House of Cards” reflects the misogynistic treatment of women journalists in Washington. I can attest that the phenomenon Marin Cogan reports is equally true in Frankfort (and perhaps other capitals), and applies to women staffers as well:
In popular fictions of Washington, everyone is a prostitute in one way or another; when it comes to female journalists, though, the comparison is often tediously literal. “I can play the whore,” Barnes later tells her very own congressman, House Majority Whip Francis Underwood. It’s not that sex never happens between political reporters and their sources, as David Petraeus’s affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, recently reminded us. It’s not even that women (and men) don’t sometimes flirt in the process ofnews gathering. It’s just that the notion of sexy young reporters turning tricks for tips is not how news is usually made in the nation’s capital. For every Judith Miller, the ex–New York Times reporter who would sometimes quote her live-in lover, former Representative and Defense Secretary Les Aspin, there are dozens of female journalists for whom the power of appropriations is not an aphrodisiac. We have not “all done it,” as Skorsky claims. And yet, the reporter-seductress stereotype persists, in part because some men in Washington refuse to relinquish it.
As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.” One journalist remembers a group of lobbyists insisting that she was not a full-time reporter at a major publication but a college coed. Another tried wearingscarves and turtlenecks to keep a married K Street type from staring at her chest for their entire meeting. The last time she saw him, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent; his eyes, however, were still fixed on the same spot. Almost everyone has received the late-night e-mail—“You’re incredible” or “Are you done with me yet?”—that she is not entirely sure how to handle. They’re what another lady political writer refers to as “drunk fumbles” or “the result of lonely and insecure people trying to make themselves feel loved and/or important.”
These are the stories you don’t hear, in part because they don’t occupy the fantasies of the mostly male scriptwriters of Washington dramas and in part because women reporters are reluctant to signal to any source—past, present, or future—that they might not be discreet or trustworthy. Such stories tend to fall on the spectrum somewhere between amusing and appalling. Sometimes they reach the level of stalking: One colleague had a high-profile member of Congress go out of his way to track down her cell-phone number, call and text repeatedly to tell her she was beautiful, offer to take her parents on a tour of the Capitol, and even invite her to go boating back home in his district…
Studies suggest that men are more likely than women to interpret friendly interest as sexual attraction, and this is a constant hazard for women in the profession. The problem, in part, is that the rituals of cultivating sources—initiating contact, inviting them out for coffee or a drink, showing intenseinterest in their every word—can often mimic the rituals of courtship, creating opportunities for interested parties on either side of the reporter-source relationship to blur the line between the professional and personal. A source may invite you to meet at the bar around the corner from your apartment. If you agree, he might offer to pay for the drinks and walk you home. One Washington climate reporter remembers an environmentalist stroking her leg at one such outing and noting, disapprovingly, that she hadn’t shaved.
“I always remind young female reporters to be wary about falling victim to the ‘source-date,’ ” says Shira Toeplitz, politics editor at Roll Call. “You’re on a second glass of something, and it occurs to you, he may be misinterpreting this as a date. I advise them to drop an obvious clue along the lines of, ‘I’m going to expense this.’ ”
A study found that Detroit’s declining population, decimated economy and chaotic administration has led to its dysfunction. How can the city turn itself around?
Adam Zemke @adamzemke (Ann Arbor, MI) Michigan State Representative
Jeff Smith @JeffSmithMO (Montclair, NJ) Assistant Professor in the Urban Policy Graduate Program at the New School; Former State Senator for Inner City St. Louis
John Celock @JohnCelockHP (Washington, DC) HuffPost State Government Reporter
John Patrick Leary (Detroit, MI) Asst. Professor of American Literature
Stefen Welch @stefenj (Detroit , MI) Partner Coordinator at Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation
Contributing RP and former Missouri State Sen. Jeff Smith talks about his political advice column, “Do As I Say,” which helps other politicians and professionals who find themselves in compromising positions:
By Jonathan Miller, on Sun Feb 10, 2013 at 11:19 AM ET
Last week, I joined Kentucky Agriculture Commissioner Jamie Comer in support of legalizing industrial hemp on the public broadcasting program, Kentucky Tonight. Click the picture at left to watch our debate with law enforcement officials.
Viewers of the program noticed that the two sides disagreed on some very critical underlying facts about the differences between hemp and marijuana and how the two plants are grown.
Janet Patton of the Lexington Herald-Leader spent a few weeks investigating this matter, and interviewing objective experts. Here is an excerpt from her story published today:
The nightmare hemp scenario for Kentucky State Police apparently is a field legally licensed to grow hemp forgrain with illegally planted marijuana mingled in.
Unlike hemp grown for fiber (when the plants are inches apart to promote tall stalk growth), the hemp grown for grain and marijuana plants would look substantially the same, said Jeremy Triplett, supervisor of the state police forensic lab.
Both could be shorter and bushy. The only way to really know, he said, would be to test for delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the chemical that gives marijuana smokers a high.
Such testing could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, at $755 per quantitative analysis, not to mention $1.8 million in start-up expenses, state police have estimated.
But would that really happen? Would an unscrupulous pot grower plant marijuana with hemp?
Take Canada, where marijuana also is illegal but hemp has been legallygrown since 1998. “Health Canada’s Industrial Hemp Program has never found marijuana growing in hemp fields instead of hemp,” the agency said in a statement.
They’ve looked. A lot.
Canadian inspectors take samples annually from each field and have found THClevels slightly above 0.3 percent from stress during growing, but not above 0.5 percent, Health Canada said.
Keith Watson, Manitoba Agriculture Food and Rural Initiatives agronomist, has seen and tested most of the hemp grown in his province in the past 15 years. Does marijuana creep in?
“I’ve never run into it,” Watson said. About 95 percent of the crop is sampled annually, and he said that marijuana and grain hemp might look just alike and could be planted side by side and only an expert eye might distinguish the difference. But in his experience, it just doesn’t happen.
“Over the years, that’s taken me out to an awful lot of fields,” Watson said. “I’ve never found marijuana in the field or any trace of it.”
He said a “handful” of times he has seen paths cut into the fields, places where people have topped the plants. But it doesn’t happen much anymore.
“After a couple of years, nobody bothers it,” he said.
What about marijuana?
As for marijuana growers using hemp to pad their illegal pot, “the general impression is that’s a self-regulating industry,” Watson said. “They’ll get away with it once … but if the quality (of the marijuana) isn’t up to par, there will be a lot of broken kneecaps.”
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Feb 4, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET
A kinder, gentler Breaking Bad?
I love this series but it can be over-the-top with fringe plot developments and crazy characters as the mild mannered former high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, becomes a successful meth dealer.
I was wondered the other night what it might look like if Breaking Bad had been written with a more mainstream and gentler, kinder theme. Maybe call it, “Veering incautiously” instead of the rogue sounding “Breaking Bad.” And instead of making Walter White an ever-hardening meth dealer, write a more mainstream method for handling his personal crisis. What if, for example, instead of cooking and selling meth, Walter instead became a celebrated shoe cobbler (selling custom made and hand crafted suede shoes that become very popular in some circles)?
Sure the series may have a different feel and tone, but would it also be more plausible? Would it widen potential audience appeal since more people can identify with shoe-makers than meth dealers?
Here’s a video clip giving us a peek of what this series might have looked like as Walter sells a pair of blue suede shoes to internationally known shoe fashion designer Tuco Salamanaca. (Just imagine shoes and not methamphetamine is being transacted in this scene.) Tuco is renown for his exacting taste and relentless drive for perfection in his shoe line. Despite being skeptical about Walter at first—and being obviously flustered that the shoes he tries on are too “tight” —Tuco is still won over by Walter’s attention to detail and skilled craftsmanship. In fact, so much so, Tuco buys them on the spot (even though they are an unusual “blue” shade) and suggests future purchases for his shoe line in pink and yellow.
But there is still the critical question, Would the series work as well with Walter as shoe cobbler —or is something lost.
Warning: Foul language even though we are pretending they are talking about shoe design.
But remember, the high end shoe market is a brutally competitive business. So this scene may not be too far off the mark. ; )
By Lauren Mayer, on Tue Jan 22, 2013 at 5:00 PM ET
In case you’ve been under a rock for the past week, dethroned cyclist Lance Armstrong ‘told all’ to the queen of the confessional, Oprah Winfrey. And most people reacted much like Claude Rains’ character in Casablanca upon learning about gambling at Rick’s – “we’re shocked, simply shocked” – or something to that effect. The highly promoted, well-publicized interview covered many subjects, but I was surprised that Oprah stayed away from the good stuff, or at least what seems most interesting for a hopeless romantic like me who knows nothing about competitive cycling (but is addicted to Downton Abbey and Jane Austen): his love life! Armstrong has certainly been a cad to his teammates, trainers, sponsors, and anyone else he’s sued or insulted (and I love his defense of all the horrid things he said about his teammate’s wife, claiming as long as he didn’t say she was ‘fat’, all the other names he called her were okay). But he’s been spectacularly awful to his romantic partners, dumping his first wife for a glamorous rockstar, whom he then very publicly dumped because she wanted kids, ironically next taking up with a child star (okay, Ashley Olsen was an adult by that point but she still looks like a teenage waif), and then adding insult to injury by having two kids with the newest girlfriend.
I’m hoping the resilient and talented Ms. Crow will pull a Taylor Swift and write some devastating new song about Armstrong’s betrayal of her, but in the meantime, I’ve taken a stab at it myself.
The above graphic, passed along by the Huffington Post‘s Laura Bassett, was put together by the Enliven Project using data from Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey and FBI reports. It drives home extremely well the fact that false rape accusations are exceedingly rare, despite what media reports might suggest. Almost as rare are cases when rapists actually go to jail.
Update: Rape statistics are notoriously hard to collect, and Amanda Marcotte has a compelling critique of the methods used here, which Enliven describes in more detail here. So while the phenomena described here are real (and Marcotte argues that, if anything, the chart exaggerates the number of false accusations), be aware that the exact numbers are subject to dispute.
