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avaranda7 · 3 years

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Blog Post Week 3 Due 9/9

What issues emerged with the creation of algorithms in digital decision-making systems?

To fully answer this question, it is crucial to think back to last week's reading, in which we discovered that there is little minority representation in media companies. Arguably the same inference can be made in the technology industry as there is little gender diversity and people of color representation. Therefore, we must note that the people creating code and algorithms are most likely white cisgender men.

Algorithms place a target on minorities and disproportionally affect "low-income communities of color" as well as "impacts poor and working-class people across the color line" (Eurbanks, 2018, pg. 27). This is necessary to understand because algorithms decide who gets loans and what rates to give people for insurance, credit, etc., and all of these decisions impact a person's life. If odds are set against people, they have less of a chance to succeed in society.

What are some issues with facial recognition in law enforcement?

Facial recognition in law enforcement is problematic due to the fact that software programs can not correctly identify culprits. As mentioned in "Another Arrest, and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match" by Kasmire Hill (2020), " a national study of over 100 facial recognition algorithms found that they did not work as well on Black and Asian faces" (pg. 1). To make matters worst, not only is facial recognition flawed, but it is often rooted in racism as those who use facial recognition technology tend to group those with the same ethnic/racial features together due to the assumption that they "all look the same." The consequence of wrongful conviction can be very detrimental as people end up in jail, lose employment and have a hard time overturning sentences. Instead of being treated as innocent till proven guilty, individuals are treated as guilty till proven innocent.

What are some harmful misconceptions about technology?

Regarding misconceptions in technology, one of the most damaging misconceptions is the idea that technology is not bias.

Algorithms place individuals in their own social bubble, and it is critical to note that most of the public is unaware of this. Data mining software construes a digital reality for people in which ads are targeted and political agendas are pushed. Nicole Brown (2020) echos this notion when she states that "technology is not neutral."

Who is impacted by the digital divide? Why

According to Daniels (2009), "women lag behind men globally in computer use and internet access," and in the United States, the "digital divide in computer ownership and Internet access has been the effect of class (or socioeconomic status) more than gender and race" (pg.106). It is not surprising that globally women lack internet access; many cultures still view women as objects and do not prioritize their education. Internet access or computer use exposes women to a lot of helpful information, and arguably, in an attempt to keep them submissive, various cultures and institutions deny women access to the worldwide web. It is difficult for those of low socioeconomic status to access computers and the internet in the US because of the cost.

References:

Brown, N. (2020). Race and technology. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8uiAjigKy8

Daniels, J. (2009). Rethinking cyberfeminism(s): race, gender, and embodiment. women's studies quarterly, 37(1-2), 101–124.

Eubanks, V. (2019). In automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor.

Hill, K. 2020. Another arrest, and jail time, due to a bad facial recognition match. The New York Times

#csufwgst320baddies

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sarahkat · 3 years

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Week 3 Blog Post Due 9/9

Q: How does cyberfeminism along with certain internet practices help women combat inequality?

Women have been using the internet and social media to help combat gender inequality and fight against harassment by developing apps and having a safe space to speak about their experiences. I have been involved with a social media group called the Upset Homegirls who have used their social media presence to rally people together to fight against racial injustice. I believe with so many women and girls getting their news from social media, having this safe space and sites specifically for women to combat inequalities fosters a community of people who are willing to speak up and fight back against these oppressive norms.

Q: How can we create an algorithm without bias?

I personally do not believe that creating an algorithm without bias is possible. Algorithms are human made and anything human made will have some sort of bias whether it was intentional or not. To even attempt to create one without bias, one would have to start with accurately representative samples. The amount of male or female representatives must be fair along with race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. These factors are important in creating algorithms and without an accurate representation of people, there will always be bias.

Q: Should police be able to arrest someone that was recognized on facial recognition technology?

Facial recognition technology is known to have a harder time recognizing black and asian faces. Many believe that this technology “disproportionately harms the black community” (Hill, 2020). Many have been wrongfully accused and arrested simply because the technology flags and believes them to be someone else who had committed a crime. After being arrested in New Jersey, one then is put through another algorithm in order to determine their flight risk and therefore their ability for bail or to be released before the trial. I believe that police should not be able to arrest someone solely based on facial recognition because of its flaws and because that person could spend weeks in jail awaiting a trial for a crime they never committed. It does not flag the correct person with enough accuracy to be used for criminals.

Q: How is data collection affecting marginalized communities?

Marginalized communities face a higher scrutiny when it comes to data collection. They are being observed more closely when doing everyday, mundane things, traveling, or even joining a health care system. This data collection then targets them for extra scrutiny that could affect their ability to receive financial aid or government assistance. Eubanks refers to this as a, “collective red-flagging, a feedback loop of injustice” (18). These communities that rely on assistance are now unable to receive it and this in turn marginalizes them even more. Transactions made using government assistance have even been tracked and used to justify taking away these benefits.

#CSUFWGST320BADDIES

Daniels, J. (2009). Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, gender, and embodiment. WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly, 37(1-2), 101–124. https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.0.0158

Eubanks, V. (2019). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. Picador.

Hill, K. (2020). Another Arrest, and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match, 1–5.

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odalissuarez · 3 years

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Blog Post: Week 3 Due 9/9

Q1: Do you think that facial recognition technology can make more negative impacts rather than positive?

I think that facial recognition technology can make a greater impact negatively due to it “disproportionally harming the black community” (Hill, 2020). I think when someone becomes wrongfully accused of anything and having a specific skin color be the target of facial recognition mistakes can lead to a big uproar in the community that will spread widely. I don’t think that police officers should have the right to arrest someone just because of facial recognition due to many flaws that can come with technology.

Q2: what ways do you think social media has spread the topic of women empowerment throughout time?

I think that social media over time has been more involved when it comes to women empowerment. I think that the media has helped women find some sort of “safe space” for themselves to express their support and emotions towards this (Daniels, 108). I also feel like women use social media to post critical information regarding this movement and not only towards females but for everyone that can better informed regarding all of this. Technology has a way of spreading such important news and information quickly and can be accessible to anyone and everyone.

Q3: when it comes to automated decisions, do you think society is getting positively or negatively affected?

Automated decisions seem to be making a larger negative effect to people of color/ minorities. I feel like these groups of people seem to be easier victims when it comes to attacking them with possible false allegations or information and just leads to an “intensified discrimination” (Eubanks, 23). I think that with this occurring, higher class won’t necessarily be affected with this but rather mainly lower class.

Q4: How can algorithms produce false data that can affect certain individuals?

I think that algorithms may have some sort of inaccurate and unbiased outcomes that can be connected to race. An example can be regarding the healthcare system and people of color already being cut shorter than someone who is white (Brown, 2020). There is a greater portion of people of color to not have health care support compared to white people and that causes an algorithm to not be accurate and can possibly produce false data.

Brown, N. (2020). Race and Technology. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8uiAjigKy8

Daniels, J. (2009). Rethinking Cyberfeminism(s): Race, gender, and embodiment. Women's Studies Quarterly, 37(1-2), 101–124.

Eubanks, V. (2019). In Automating Inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor.

Hill, K. 2020. Another arrest, and jail time, due to a bad facial recognition match. The New York Times

#CSUFWGST320BADDIES

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nancydhooper · 3 years

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Family Surveillance by Algorithm: The Rapidly Spreading Tools Few Have Heard Of

Last month, police took American Idol finalist Syesha Mercado’s days-old newborn Ast away because she had not reported her daughter’s birth to authorities, while she was still fighting to regain custody of her son from the state. In February 2021, Syesha had taken her 13-month-old son Amen’Ra to a hospital because he had difficulty transitioning from breast milk to formula and was refusing to eat. What should have been an ordinary medical visit for a new mom prompted a state-contracted child abuse pediatrician with a known history of wrongfully reporting medical conditions as child abuse to call child welfare. Authorities took custody of Amen’Ra on the grounds that Syesha had neglected him. Syesha has been reunited with Ast after substantial media attention and public outrage, but continues to fight for the return of Amen’Ra.

Meanwhile, it took over a year and a half for Erin Yellow Robe, a member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe, to be reunited with her children. Based on an unsubstantiated rumor that Erin was misusing prescription pills, authorities took custody of her children and placed them with white foster parents — despite the federal Indian Child Welfare Act’s requirements and the willingness of relatives and tribal members to care for the children.

For white families, these scenarios typically do not lead to child welfare involvement. For Black and Indigenous families, they often lead to years — potentially a lifetime — of ensnarement in the child welfare system or, as some are now more appropriately calling it, the family regulation system.

Child Welfare as Disparate Policing

Our country’s latest reckoning with structural racism has involved critical reflection on the role of the criminal justice system, education policy, and housing practices in perpetuating racial inequity. The family regulation system needs to be added to this list, along with the algorithms working behind the scenes. That’s why the ACLU has conducted a nationwide survey to learn more about these tools.

Women and children who are Indigenous, Black, or experiencing poverty are disproportionately placed under child welfare’s scrutiny. Once there, Indigenous and Black families fare worse than their white counterparts at nearly every critical step. These disparities are partly the legacy of past social practices and government policies that sought to tear apart Indigenous and Black families. But the disparities are also the result of the continued policing of women in recent years through child welfare practices, public benefits laws, the failed war on drugs, and other criminal justice policies that punish women who fail to conform to particular conceptions of “fit mothers.”

Turning to Predictive Analytics for Solutions

Many child welfare agencies have begun turning to risk assessment tools for reasons ranging from wanting the ability to predict which children are at higher risk for maltreatment to improving agency operations. Allegheny County, Pennsylvania has been using the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) since 2016. The AFST generates a risk score for complaints received through the county’s child maltreatment hotline by looking at whether certain characteristics of the agency’s past cases are also present in the complaint allegations. Key among these characteristics are family member demographics and prior involvement with the county’s child welfare, jail, juvenile probation, and behavioral health systems. Intake staff then use this risk score as an aide in deciding whether or not to follow up on a complaint with a home study or a formal investigation, or to dismiss it outright.

Like their criminal justice analogues, however, child welfare risk assessment tools do not predict the future. For instance, a recidivism risk assessment tool measures the odds that a person will be arrested in the future, not the odds that they will actually commit a crime. Just as being under arrest doesn’t necessarily mean you did something illegal, a child’s removal from the home, often the target of a prediction model, doesn’t necessarily mean a child was in fact maltreated.

We examined how many jurisdictions across the 50 states, D.C., and U.S. territories are using one category of predictive analytics tools: models that systematically use data collected by jurisdictions’ public agencies to attempt to predict the likelihood that a child in a given situation or location will be maltreated. Here’s what we found:

Local or state child welfare agencies in at least 26 states plus D.C. have considered using such predictive tools. Of these, jurisdictions in at least 11 states are currently using them.

Large jurisdictions like New York City, Oregon, and Allegheny County have been using predictive analytics for several years now.

Some tools currently in use, such as the AFST, are used when deciding whether to refer a complaint for further agency action, while others are used to flag open cases for closer review because the tool deems them to be higher-risk scenarios.

The Flaws of Predictive Analytics

Despite the growing popularity of these tools, few families or advocates have heard about them, much less provided meaningful input into their development and use. Yet countless policy choices and value judgments are made in the course of creating and using the tool, any or all of which can impact whether the tool promotes “fairness” or reduces racial disproportionality in agency action.

Moreover, like the tools we have seen in the criminal legal system, any tool built from a jurisdiction’s historical data runs the risk of continuing and increasing existing bias. Historically over-regulated and over-separated communities may get caught in a feedback loop that quickly magnifies the biases in these systems. Who decides what “high risk” means? When a caseworker sees a “high” risk score for a Black person, do they respond in the same way as they would for a white person?

Ultimately, we must ask whether these tools are the best way to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, when such funds are urgently needed to help families avoid the crises that lead to abuse and neglect allegations.

What the ACLU is Doing

It’s critical that we interrogate these tools before they become entrenched, as they have in the criminal justice system. Information about the data used to create a predictive algorithm, the policy choices embedded in the tool, and the tool’s impact both system-wide and in individual cases are some of the things that should be disclosed to the public before a tool is adopted and throughout its use. In addition to such transparency, jurisdictions need to make available opportunities to question and contest a tool’s implementation or application in a specific instance if our policymakers and elected officials are to be held accountable for the rules and penalties enforced through such tools.

In this vein, the ACLU has requested data from Allegheny County and other jurisdictions to independently evaluate the design and impact of their predictive analytics tools and any measures they may be taking to address fairness, due process, and civil liberty concerns.

It’s time that all of us ask our local policymakers to end the unnecessary and harmful policing of families through the family regulation system.

Read the full white paper:

https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/family-surveillance-algorithm

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riverdamien · 4 years

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Voting is A Renewable Resource

In Our Flawed Democracy, Voting Is a Renewable Resource

By Adam Russell Taylor

September18, 2020

“With less than 50 days until the last day to vote in this election, we are entering into the final sprint of what feels like the most consequential election certainly in my lifetime. Sojourners has long warned of the danger of narrow, single-issue voting, advocating instead that Christians should vote all of their values across a broad range of issues. But as Rev. Jim Wallis argued so well last week, we believe that racism is the central religious issue in the upcoming election. Of course, even referring to racism as “an issue” feels inappropriate because the pernicious and pervasive impacts of racism collide with every issue at stake in this election. That is why, between now and the final day of voting on Nov. 3, we will examine in greater depth a range of key issues through the lens of race. We hope and pray that this motivates you to vote up and down the ballot — from local school board races to district attorneys to congressional candidates and, of course, president of the United States.

While applying our faith and biblical principles to political choices can be both messy and challenging, what should unite us as Christians is who we prioritize when we enter the voting booth. From God’s requirement to “act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6:8), to Jesus’ overriding ethic to care for those in need and to liberate the oppressed (Matthew 25 and Luke 4), the gospel is crystal clear that our first order priority as Christians is to protect and uplift people in the most vulnerable circumstances and most marginal places. This standard applies to how we live and to how we participate in public life, including how we vote. In every election, we must identify and carry with us the modern-day widows, orphans, immigrant people, and the disinherited. We must ask how candidates for every public office will defend and prioritize them while advancing the common good.

The moral responsibility of voting

In a democracy, even in one that is as flawed as our own, voting is an imperative for faithful citizenship and Christian discipleship. It is both a weapon for how we combat injustice and a renewable resource for how we restrain evil and advance the common good. Voting is also about accountability. As civil rights leader Cesar Chavez once said, “The day will come when the politicians do the right thing by our people out of political necessity and not out of charity or idealism.”

Abdicating this civic right and religious responsibility dishonors those who fought so hard for it and jeopardizes our very future. For those of you who are disillusioned with your choices, remember that a non-vote is actually a vote for the status quo. We are always faced with imperfect choices, and the kingdom of God is never squarely on the ballot. But we must use our spiritual discernment and prudential judgment to choose candidates who we believe most share our values, embrace our priorities, and will be best able to implement policies that prioritize those in need.

Faithful voting reflects a combination of our understanding of the candidate’s positions on important issues, your sense of their character, and their history of accomplishments. Voting can’t be reduced to a purely transactional exercise based on self-interest. Integrity and truth-telling, empathy and compassion, courage and conviction — these traits matter. So do experience and accomplishments, either in or out of office, because they provide a window into what a candidate will likely do if elected.

When we say the upcoming election is the most consequential election in our lifetime, it is not hyperbole or political spin, but a reflection of the perilous nature the crises that our communities, our nation, and our world face — the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism, the ongoing crisis of climate change, the deep erosion in public trust and alarming levels of polarization, and staggering levels of inequality and poverty. We must resist an “us versus them” politics and embrace a broader “we,” committing to advance the common good. Groundbreaking polling and research by More in Common finds that a majority of Americans, which they refer to as “the exhausted majority,” are fed up with America’s deep polarization and yearn for politicians who are solutions-oriented, reject incivility and zero-sum politics, and emphasize the ways in which we have more in common than what divides us.

Sojourners’ mission rests on three core pillars: economic and racial justice, life and peace, and environmental stewardship. We hope that these pillars can provide a practical roadmap in the midst of this contentious election. First and foremost, as it relates to faithful citizenship, that means whether all citizens will have the opportunity to vote in a free, fair, and safe election is of central concern. As we've written over the years, it is an assault on the imago dei, the image of God in each and every one of us, to attempt to suppress even one person's vote. In this time of pandemic that has already claimed nearly 200,000 lives in the United States, we should be making it easier to vote safely, not harder.

A racial and economic reckoning

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic hangs over the entire 2020 election like a thick and unrelenting fog. By the time of Election Day, the nation will be approaching a staggering 250,000 deaths from the virus. We need leaders who can provide bold, science-driven direction to combat the virus, care for those in the most vulnerable conditions, and foster an economic recovery that leads to a radically more just and equitable new normal. We need leaders committed to calling forth our sense of communal responsibility to protect ourselves and our neighbors by wearing masks and practicing social distancing for as long as is deemed necessary. We also need leaders who understand our moral responsibilities and practical interdependence with the rest of the world, which requires global leadership in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. Alarmingly, due to the pandemic and global recession, the World Bank estimates that 40-60 million additional people will fall into extreme poverty in 2020 and the Gates Foundation estimates that the pandemic has set back global health and the Sustainable Development Goal agenda by 25 years.

In the midst of our nation's ongoing and long overdue racial reckoning, we should support leaders who understand how centuries of structural racism affect every facet of our economy and society — and who have concrete plans to redress these injustices. The pandemic of racial police violence and systemic racism will require elected officials who are committed to more than simply cosmetic or incremental reforms to policing and criminal justice. We need leaders who are willing and able to ensure equal justice under the law applies to Black lives and who support both bold reforms and real transformation.

To give just one example, it's important to understand the influence wielded by district attorneys, sheriffs, judges, mayors, and members of town and city councils to control how public safety and policing are conducted in our communities. We should be keenly attentive to the impact candidates and ballot initiatives are likely to have on the protection of Black lives specifically.

Of course, issues of racial equity stretch far beyond policing and criminal justice and into education, employment, health care, and so much more. There is an integral connection between racism and poverty that should inform how we think about economic justice, which in turn should heavily influence how we vote. We should scrutinize policies and policy makers to ensure that the solutions they propose to the immediate economic crisis most benefit those who have the least, rather than exacerbating the existing inequalities that were already getting worse before COVID-19. The 2,000 verses in the Bible proclaiming God's justice for the poor and the oppressed demand to be taken seriously by Christians when they step into the voting booth. The exercise of this civic duty cannot be divorced from the tangible impacts officeholders and their policies have on the advancement of racial and economic justice or the furthering of injustice and oppression. And we must elect leaders who will end inhumane detention, reverse mass deportations, and are determined to finally pass bold, just, and effective reforms that provide a permanent solution — and do not discriminate against Black, Indigenous, and people of color — for DACAmented people and enabling over 11 million undocumented men, women and children to pursue a path to citizenship.

How we do life together

We believe that Christians are called to support and protect the life and essential dignity of all of God's children through every stage of life, no exceptions. That means the lives of children separated from their parents at the border, regardless of citizenship, are worth no less than lives in the womb. Abortion is so often used as a political wedge; instead, we can support leaders who are committed to working together to dramatically reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies through common ground solutions, such as increasing access to health care, ensuring access to affordable child care, and enhancing reproductive health. Protecting life means opposing capital punishment and supporting active peacemaking to prevent armed conflict. It means taking weapons of war off of our streets and keeping them away from our schools. It means supporting gender equity and justice and supporting policies that end domestic and sexual violence.

It’s important to note again that people of color are affected by each and every one of these threats to life and peace disproportionately, both in the United States and around the world.

Protecting the future

When we vote, we are making decisions ranging from which member of the town council supports initiatives to ensure clean drinking water for people in low-income housing to which candidate supports international treaties to combat climate change. It also means examining candidates and policies to determine who will protect the land and water rights of Indigenous people from multinational corporations. The stain and sin of racism are very much present in these issues as well, as we see egregious examples of environmental racism from contaminated water in Flint to lead paint in Baltimore. We're seeing increasingly dire consequences of our changing climate already; science tells us the worst impacts are still ahead of us — and we are running out of time to avoid catastrophe. That’s why we must support politicians who offer bold leadership to combat climate change and advance environmental justice.

Just before the 2016 election, Congressman John Lewis said, “the right to vote is precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent tool or instrument in a democratic society.” We must all not only utilize this powerful tool, we must use it wisely so that together we elect leaders capable of and committed to advancing liberty and justice for all and transforming our nation’s broken politics.”

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One of my favorite stories comes from Hindu Scripture. There are two knights of differing opinions and each day they awake, eat breakfast, and spend the day fighting’s, with all of their strength. When one loses they lay down their swords, sit down, laughing, and fellowship together. They agree to disagree, and are friends.

A friend and I were recently talking about our view on medical marijuana and she told me, “I do not agree with your position, but I love you any way.” I have friends and supporters of all political persuasions, races, creeds, religious and ethnic groups, and what ties us together is our love of one another, and our love of the street youth we serve. We agree to disagree. Win or lose we are always friends. We talk to each other, we fight with each other, but at the end of the day we sit down, eat together, laugh and play together. For all that truly matters are our love of one another. In this world full of storms, all we have is each other.

We are all children of one God, let us agree to disagree, and care for each other, be there for each other, and bring healing and peace to our nation and world. Deo Gratias! Thanks be to God!

Father River Damien Sims, sfw,D.Min.,D.S.T.

P.O. Box 642656

San Francisco, CA 94164

www.temenos.org

(Sorry for three blogs but we felt the timing of each was important.)

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random-notes-and-jottings · 4 years

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How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture

Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact.

The delete button over a tumbrel

Story by Helen Lewis

JULY 14, 2020

GLOBAL

Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent. Commentators warn of “mob justice,” while activists exult in their newfound power to change the world.

Both groups are right, and wrong. Because the best way to see the firings, outings, and online denunciations grouped together as “cancel culture,” is not through a social lens, but an economic one.

Take the fall of the film producer Harvey Weinstein, which seems inevitable in hindsight—everyone knew he was a sex pest! There were even jokes about it on 30 Rock! But it took The New York Times months of reporting to ready its first story for publishing; the newspaper was taking on someone with deep pockets and a history of intimidating critics into silence. Then the story went off like a hand grenade. Suddenly, the mood—and the economic incentives—shifted. People who had been afraid of Weinstein were instead afraid of being taken down alongside him.

The removal of Weinstein from his company, and his subsequent conviction for rape, is a good outcome. But the mechanism it revealed is more morally ambiguous: The court of public opinion was the only forum left after workplace protections and the judicial system had failed. The writer Jon Schwarz once described the “iron law of institutions,” under which people with seniority inside an institution care more about preserving their power within the institution than they do about the power of the institution as a whole. That self-preservation instinct also operates when private companies—institutions built on maximizing shareholder value, or other capitalist principles—struggle to acclimatize to life in a world where many consumers vocally support social-justice causes. Progressive values are now a powerful branding tool.

But that is, by and large, all they are. And that leads to what I call the “iron law of woke capitalism”: Brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival. (I’m not using the word woke here in a sneering, pejorative sense, but to highlight that the original definition of wokeness is incompatible with capitalism. Also, I’m not taking credit for the coinage: The writer Ross Douthat got there first.) In fact, let’s go further: Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this is the random firings of individuals, some of whose infractions are minor, and some of whom are entirely innocent of any bad behavior. In the first group goes the graphic designer Sue Schafer, outed by The Washington Post for attending a party in ironic blackface—a tone-deaf attempt to mock Megyn Kelly for not seeing what was wrong with blackface. Schafer, a private individual, was confronted at the party over the costume, went home in tears, and apologized to the hosts the next day. When the Post ran a story naming her, she was fired. New York magazine found numerous Post reporters unwilling to defend the decision to run the story—and plenty of unease that the article seemed more interested in exonerating the Post than fighting racism. Even less understandable is the case of Niel Golightly, communications chief at the aircraft company Boeing, who stepped down over a 33-year-old article arguing that women should not serve in the military. When Barack Obama, a notably progressive president, only changed his mind on gay marriage in the 2010s, how many Americans’ views from 1987 would hold up to scrutiny by today’s standards? This mechanism is not, as it is sometimes presented, a long-overdue settling of scores by underrepresented voices. It is a reflexive jerk of the knee by the powerful; a demonstration of institutions’ unwillingness to tolerate any controversy, whether those complaining are liberal or conservative. Another case where the punishment does not fit the offense is that of the police detective Florissa Fuentes, who reposted a picture from her niece taken at a Black Lives Matter protest. One of those pictured held a sign reading who do we call when the murderer wear the badge. Another sign, according to the Times, “implied that people should shoot back at the police.” Fuentes, a 30-year-old single mother to three children, deleted the post and apologized, but was fired nonetheless.

In the second group, the blameless, lies Emmanuel Cafferty, a truck driver who appears to have been tricked into making an “okay” symbol by a driver he cut off at a traffic light. The inevitable viral video claimed that this was a deliberate use of the symbol as a white-power gesture, and he was promptly fired. Cafferty is a working-class man in his 40s from San Diego. The loss of his job hit him hard enough that he saw a counselor. “A man can learn from making a mistake,” he told my colleague Yascha Mounk. “But what am I supposed to learn from this? It’s like I was struck by lightning.”

The phrase is haunting—not being racist is not going to save you if the lightning strikes. Nor is the fact that your comments lie decades in the past, or that they have been misinterpreted by bad-faith actors, or that you didn’t make them. The ground—your life—is scorched just the same.

It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets. We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease. But we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established. Afraid of the reputational damage that can be incurred in minutes, companies are behaving in ways that range from thoughtless and uncaring to sadistic. For Cafferty’s employer, what’s one random truck driver versus the PR bump of being able to cut off a bad news cycle by saying you’ve fired your “white-supremacist employee”?

Let’s look at another example of how woke capitalism operates. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, and the protests that followed, White Fragility, a 2018 book by Robin DiAngelo, returned to the top of The New York Times’s paperback-nonfiction chart. The author is white, and her book is for white people, encouraging them to think about what it’s like to be white. So the American book-buying public’s single biggest response to the Black Lives Matter movement was … to buy a book about whiteness written by a white person.

This is worse than mere navel-gazing; it’s synthetic activism. It risks making readers feel full of piety and righteousness without having actually done anything. Buying a book on white fragility improves the lives of the most marginalized far less than, say, donating to a voting-rights charity or volunteering at a food bank. It’s pure hobbyism.

Why is DiAngelo’s book so popular? Again, look at economics. White Fragility is a staple of formal diversity training, in universities from London to Iowa, and at publications including Britain’s right-wing Telegraph newspaper, as well as The Atlantic. The client list on DiAngelo’s website includes giant corporations such as Amazon and Unilever; nonprofits such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Hollywood Writers Guild, and the YMCA; as well as institutions and governmental bodies such as Seattle Public Schools, the City of Oakland, and the Metropolitan Council of Minneapolis.

In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year, according to Iris Bohnet, a public-policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And yet, after studying programs in both the U.S. and post-conflict countries such as Rwanda, she concluded, “sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.” Part of the problem is that although those delivering them are undoubtedly well-meaning, the training programs are typically no more scientifically grounded than previous management-course favorites, such as Myers-Briggs personality classifications. “Implicit-bias tests” are controversial, and the claim that they can predict real-world behavior, never mind reduce bias, is shaky. A large-scale analysis of research in the sector found that “changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.” Yet metrics-obsessed companies love these forms of training. When the British Labour leader, Keir Starmer, caused offense by referring to Black Lives Matter as a “moment” rather than a movement, he announced that he would undergo implicit-bias training. It is an approach that sees bias as a moral flaw among individuals, rather than a product of systems. It encourages personal repentance, rather than institutional reform. Bohnet suggested other methods to increase diversity, such as removing ages and photographs from job applications, and reviewing the language used for advertisements. (Men are more likely to see themselves as “assertive,” she argued.) Here is another option for big companies: Put your money into paying all junior staff enough for them to live in the big city where the company is based, without needing help from their parents. That would increase the company’s diversity. Hell, get your staff to read White Fragility on their own time and give your office cleaners a pay raise.

This, however, would break the iron law of woke capitalism—better to have something you can point to and say “Aren’t we progressive?” than to think about the real problem. Diversity training offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: Don’t change the board; just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar.

If this is a moment for power structures to be challenged, and old orthodoxies to be overturned, then understanding the difference between economic radicalism and social radicalism is vital. These could also be described as the difference between identity and class. That is not to dismiss the former: Many groups face discrimination on both measures. Women might not be hired because “Math isn’t for girls” or because an employer doesn’t want to pay for maternity leave. An employer may not see the worth of a minority applicant, because they don’t speak the way the interviewer expects, or that applicant might be a second-generation immigrant whose parents can’t subsidize them through several years of earning less than a living wage.

All this I’ve learned from feminism, where the contrast between economic and social radicalism is very apparent. Equal pay is economically radical. Hiring a female or minority CEO for the first time is socially radical. Diversity training is socially radical, at best. Providing social-housing tenants with homes not covered in flammable cladding is economically radical. Changing the name of a building at a university is socially radical; improving on its 5 percent enrollment rate for Black students—perhaps by smashing up the crazy system of legacy admissions—would be economically radical.

In my book Difficult Women, I wrote that the only question I want to ask big companies who claim to be “empowering the female leaders of the future” is this one: Do you have on-site child care? You can have all the summits and power breakfasts that you want, but unless you address the real problems holding working parents back, then it’s all window dressing.

Along with anti-racism and anti-sexism efforts, LGBTQ politics suffers a similar confusion between economic and social radicalism. The arrival of Pride month brings the annual argument about how it should be a “protest, not a parade.” The violence and victimization of the Stonewall-riot era risk being forgotten in today’s “branded holiday,” where big banks and clothing manufacturers fly the rainbow flag to boost their corporate image. In Britain and the U.S., these corporate sponsors want a depoliticized party—a generic celebration of love and acceptance—without tough questions about their views on particular domestic laws and policies, or their involvement in countries with poor records on LGBTQ rights. Some activists in Britain have tried to get Pride marches to stop allowing the arms company BAE to be a sponsor, given its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, an explicitly homophobic and sexist state. When Amazon sponsored last year’s PinkNews Awards, the former Doctor Who screenwriter Russell T. Davies used his lifetime-achievement-award acceptance speech to tell the retailer to “pay your fucking taxes.” That’s economic radicalism.

Activists regularly challenge criticisms of “cancel culture” by saying: “Come on, we’re just some people with Twitter accounts, up against governments and corporate behemoths.” But when you look at the economic incentives, almost always, the capitalist imperative is to yield to activist pressure. Just a bit. Enough to get them off your back. Companies caught in the scorching light of a social-media outcry are ike politicians caught lying or cheating, who promise a “judge-led inquiry”: They want to do something, anything, to appear as if they are taking the problem seriously—until the spotlight moves on.

Some defenestrations are brilliant, and long overdue. Weinstein’s removal from a position of power was undoubtedly a good thing. But the firing of Emmanuel Cafferty was not. For activists, the danger lies in the cheap sugar rush of tokenistic cancellations. Real institutional change is hard; like politics, it is the “slow boring of hard boards.” Persuading a company to toss someone overboard for PR points risks a victory that is no victory at all. The pitchforks go down, but the corporate culture remains the same. The survivors sigh in relief. The institution goes on.

If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is. When people talk about the “excesses of the left”—a phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing voters—in many cases they’re talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that aren’t left-wing at all.

Remember the iron law of woke institutions: For those looking to preserve their power, it makes sense to do the minimum amount of social radicalism necessary to survive … and no economic radicalism at all. The latter is where activists need to apply their pressure.

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tcifiscal · 4 years

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Criminal Justice Reform in the Commonwealth: 1.6 Million People in Virginia with a Criminal Record Deserve A Fair Chance To Succeed

In the wake of a national conversation about racism, policing, and criminal justice reform, the time has come for changes to a system that has disproportionately targeted and incarcerated communities of color. This summer’s special session will be the next opportunity for Virginia’s lawmakers to advance necessary reforms, including new “fair chance” policies that remove counterproductive barriers – including in areas of employment, housing, and education – and allow people with criminal records to build a more secure economic future.

A Flawed, Racially Biased System

Decades of “tough on crime” policies and mass incarceration have left more than 70 million people – or nearly one in three adults – in the United States with an arrest or conviction record. As a consequence, nearly half of all children in the country have at least one parent with a criminal record, making it easier for poverty to linger for multiple generations.

But these trends have not been equally experienced, including in our commonwealth. A variety of factors – including discriminatory laws, practices (e.g., “broken windows” policing), and implicit biases – mean that race is a major factor at every stage of the justice system, such that Black Americans experience more frequent stops, searches, and arrests by police, while also facing higher rates of pre-trial detention, and ultimately harsher sentences than similarly situated white people. In fact, Black Virginians comprise about 19% of the population, but they accounted for more than 40% of all arrests in 2019. More than half – 55% – of all people in Virginia’s prisons are Black. These data points encapsulate a problem that is national in scope: in 2018, for every 100,000 adults in the United States, 555 people were imprisoned. But for every 100,000 Black adults, that number surged to more than 1,500 people.

For the nearly 13,000 people who are released from prison in Virginia each year, and even for those who have been convicted of a minor offense, the stigma of a criminal record is difficult to wash away, including in the employment context. This is in part because employer background checks have become a standard practice. When these checks turn up a record, the applicant – if they are hired at all – can expect lower earnings: men who were formerly incarcerated can expect to work nine fewer weeks per year and earn 40% less annually, for a total loss of $179,000 even before the age of 50.

These collateral consequences, however, are most pronounced for people of color. A landmark study found that among job applicants with a criminal record, the likelihood of a favorable response (e.g., an interview or job offer from the employer) for white candidates dropped by half, from 34% to 17%, but it fell by almost two-thirds, from 14% to 5%, for Black candidates. In fact, evidence suggests that white applicants with a criminal record are more likely to receive an interview from an employer than Black applicants without one. And among women who were formerly incarcerated, one analysis found that the odds of a favorable response from an employer were 93% greater for white women than for Black women. Overall, these findings underscore how job-seekers with a past criminal record are often punished twice: once for the record itself and again for the color of their skin.

The barriers to employment that people with records face undermine our economy and public safety. According to one estimate, the stigmatization of people with felony records reduces the annual U.S. gross domestic product by an estimated $78 to $87 billion. This is despite growing evidence that people with records make good employees, an important consideration for businesses and even the U.S. military. In fact, research on individuals with a felony record serving in the military found that they were promoted more quickly and to higher ranks than other enlistees and were no more likely than service members without records to be discharged for negative reasons. At the same time, access to employment and higher wages has been shown to reduce recidivism and makes our communities safer.

Creating Opportunity through Fair Chance Policy Reforms

As the General Assembly considers a menu of options to reform our criminal justice system, policies that create pathways to good-paying jobs for people with records can bolster families, communities, and our economy. These fair chance reforms, which build on existing laws in Virginia and best practices from other states, include:

Extending Ban-the-Box (BtB) to the private sector. In general, BtB laws delay when employers may inquire about a job applicant’s past criminal record, often until the interview stage. The basic goal is to ensure that an applicant is judged on their qualifications first. BtB laws often provide a framework, based on guidance from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to conduct an individualized assessment of any past convictions, including 1) the amount of time passed since the offense was committed, 2) whether the offense is related to the job sought, and 3) any evidence of the applicant’s rehabilitation. During the 2020 legislative session, the General Assembly passed – in bipartisan fashion – House Bill 757 (Del. Aird), which prohibits arrest and conviction inquiries on initial employment applications for positions with state agencies and localities. This was an important first step for people in Virginia with a record: research has shown that BtB policies “raise the probability of public employment for those with convictions by about 30% on average.” Other recent studies have found that BtB laws increase the employment of residents living in “high-crime” neighborhoods, suggesting that these policies are meaningfully increasing opportunity for people with records. To build on this progress, Virginia’s lawmakers should extend BtB to the private sector, as 13 other states across the country have done.

Reforming Virginia’s restrictive expungement law. Virginia needs a strong expungement policy both because a criminal record should not be a life sentence to poverty and research shows that an individual’s risk of recidivism drops significantly over time, eventually making them no more likely than the general public to commit a crime in the future. With this in mind, the main idea behind expungement laws is simple: once someone remains crime-free for a specified period, certain prior offenses are sealed from public view. With a “clean slate,” the goal is to knock down the many barriers – relating to employment, housing, education, and public benefits – that often result from a criminal record. Expungement policies hold the power to change lives. A recent study of Michigan’s law found that within one year after a record is cleared, people are not only more likely to be employed, but wages go up by more than 20%. Virginia’s expungement law is widely understood as one of the “least forgiving and most restrictive” laws in the nation, giving very few people the chance at a clean slate. Current law generally provides no process by which adults can expunge a past record. The law’s scope is severely limited, extending only to people who have been tried but not found guilty, people who face charges that are later dropped, and people who receive an absolute pardon from the governor. For these reasons, legislation to reform the law has become commonplace, even as the most significant reforms have failed to advance. In the 2019 session, HB 2278 (Del. Cole), which provided for the automatic expungement of a record after an absolute pardon, passed unanimously. More recently, in the 2020 regular session, a flurry of bills were introduced but did not pass, including a proposal that would have permitted people to pursue expungements of past convictions if they remain crime-free for eight years. Future reform should be guided by two key principles. First, the scope of Virginia’s law should be expanded to make expungement possible in more circumstances. For example, Maryland outlines more than 100 misdemeanors that are eligible for judicial expungement after a specified waiting period. Many other states – from North Carolina to Mississippi to Michigan – permit, in some situations, the expungement of certain felonies, especially minor, non-violent offenses and where the individual has no other significant criminal history. Second, Virginia should establish a system that seals records through an automatic process, rather than a petition process, which can be costly and time-consuming. The experiences of other states underscore why this is important: according to one study, only 6.5% of people who could get their records sealed did so within 5 years of becoming eligible. To avoid this “uptake gap,” Pennsylvania became the first state in the country to set up an automatic process, which seals arrest records after charges are dropped and for certain minor conviction records after 10 years. Virginia can learn from this model, which was enacted with bipartisan support in Pennsylvania. Indeed, the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus has specifically named automatic expungement as a necessary component of future criminal justice reform.

The Time for Reform Has Come

The work to reform our criminal justice system and unravel collateral consequences that keep too many people in Virginia in poverty is vital, urgent, and will require a sustained effort. The General Assembly can begin that work this summer.

– Phil Hernandez, Senior Policy Fellow & Counsel

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Learn more about The Commonwealth Institute at www.thecommonwealthinstitute.org

#fairchancehiring #banthebox #virginia #criminal justice #racial equity

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neptunecreek · 5 years

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Congress Is Home For the Summer and Ready to Hear From You

When it comes to politics, in-person meetings make a huge difference. Just a few questions from constituents during town halls can show a representative or senator which issues are resonating with the residents of their district or state. Even if you’ve never met an elected representative before, showing up IRL is actually pretty easy to do, and this is the perfect time: in August, Congress takes a break from considering legislation so members can be in their districts, giving you the opportunity to meet and talk to them without traveling to Washington, D.C.

While in D.C., representatives and senators have to rely on calls and emails to know what the people they represent think about the issues. Those calls and emails are important, but when they’re back in their districts, you can make sure they hear directly from you—in person—about the issues that matter to you. Even if you have called or emailed before, putting a face to the same concerns can help your elected representative understand your concerns. Even if you didn't get them to agree with you, those conversations will help shape their legislative priorities once they return to D.C. in September.

Where In the World Is My Congressional Representative?

The best way to meet your senator or representative is either to call the local office and simply ask for a meeting, or to fill out a meeting request form on the member’s official website. While it may be more difficult to meet with your Senator—who generally covers a bigger geographic area and may be further from you—your federal Representative may be more available for a meeting. The member's staff may be able set up a meeting over the phone, or they may direct you to a town hall or other district event where the member of Congress will provide an update on current events and take questions. Make sure to carefully follow any instructions listed about parking and security and look to see if you need to register ahead of time to attend.

Be aware that registering may mean including your name and contact information and that failing to register may mean you can’t get into a town hall with heightened security. If you do schedule a meeting, it’s important to know that you may not get a meeting with the actual senator or member of Congress, but meeting with Congressional staff will still get your concerns to the member. Also, consider subscribing to the online newsletters of your House member, as well as your state’s two senators, since they often email their local events directly to constituents and subscribers.

With so many issues vital to digital rights looming in the congressional calendar, this August is a perfect time for Internet users to pressure Congress in person to do the right thing. Below, you can find updates on issues that are critical to bring up with your representative, however you contact them. Tell Congress to protect free speech online, end the suspicionless collection of Americans’ telephone records, and don’t subject Internet users to huge potential fines for regular activity like sharing memes.

Protect Section 230, the Most Important Law for Preserving Free Speech and Innovation Online

Section 230 is the most important law protecting free speech online. The law shields online platforms, services, and users from liability for most speech created by others. Without Section 230, many of the online communities we all rely on every day would not exist in their current form.

Last year, Congress undermined Section 230 with the disastrous law SESTA-FOSTA, which has incentivized online platforms to censor their users, silencing marginalized voices in the process. Now, it appears that Congress has developed a taste for undermining 230 and members of both parties seem eager to do it again.

One attack on 230 has been introduced in Congress this year—Senator Hawley’s “bias” bill, which would give the government unprecedented authority to decide which online platforms are allowed to enjoy Section 230 protections. Rumor has it that there are more anti-230 bills on the way.

Please tell your members of Congress that a strong Section 230 is essential to an Internet where everyone can gather, find like-minded friends, and speak their minds. Tell them that attempts to punish large tech companies by gutting 230 will almost certainly backfire, making it far more difficult for competitors ever to reach the scale of a Google or Facebook. If you work in an Internet-based business that hosts other people’s speech, tell your member of Congress that your business and livelihood rely on Section 230.

End the NSA’s Mass Telephone Records Program

This fall, your elected official will vote on whether to reauthorize Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. This is the law that famously allows the intelligence community to demand that companies, like telephone service providers, hand over any records or any other “tangible thing” deemed “relevant” to foreign intelligence investigations.

For years, the government relied on Section 215 to conduct a dragnet surveillance program that collected billions of phone records documenting who a person called and for how long they called them—more than enough information for analysts to infer very personal details about a person, including who they have relationships with and the private nature of those relationships.

That invasive dragnet collected data without an individualized basis for suspicion, violated our privacy, and suppresses dissent and democracy. In 2015, a federal appeals court held that the mass collection of phone records is “unprecedented and unwarranted.” Later that year, Congress passed the USA FREEDOM Act, which renewed Section 215 while imposing some—albeit insufficient—limitations on the government forcing phone companies to provide the NSA with phone records from thousands or millions of Americans at once.

Now is the time to talk to your elected officials about ending the suspicionless collection of Americans’ telephone records, and encouraging transparency and public hearings on the other uses of Section 215 and what materials it gathers. These public hearings should extend to public disclosures about whether and how people can become targets of surveillance because of their speech and First Amendment-related activities, as well as their race, religion, national origin, gender, or sexual orientation.

Stop the CASE Act From Subjecting Regular Internet Users to Life-Altering Copyright Lawsuits

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act, H.B. 2426, S. 1273) is a bill that is supposed to help photographers and other artists who find their images taken and used whole, no fair use in sight. But the way the bill is written is catastrophically flawed. Instead of going to a court or a judge, the CASE Act creates a “Claims Board” at the Copyright Office in Washington DC, where “claims officers” will hear infringement claims and issue damage awards that could reach tens of thousands of dollars. Things that regular Internet users do all the time—sharing memes, images, and so forth—could make them subject to claims under CASE.

The CASE Act is often described as a system people will find themselves in “voluntarily.” This isn’t really true. Rather than requiring both sides to agree to be subject to the judgments of the Copyright Office, the bill actually requires the person receiving the complaint to “opt out” within 60 days of getting a notice from the Copyright Office. Failing to opt out—and maybe even failing to opt out in a specific way—leaves you bound by the judgments of the Copyright Office, including judgments issued by default. The net effect would not be artists collecting against true infringers, who are most likely to learn how to opt out, but instead regular people getting notices they don’t understand and ending up owing enough to put them into bankruptcy.

The CASE Act won’t help artists, will hurt regular people, and will create a perfect breeding ground for copyright trolls, who will be able to squeeze whatever money they can out of anyone unfortunate enough to wander into their sight.

While You’re At It, Tell Congress to Save Net Neutrality, Stop Face Surveillance, and Protect the Patent System

The Save the Internet Act (S. 682) would make the net neutrality protections we had under the 2015 Open Internet Order the law of the land, undoing the FCC’s repeal of these popular and important rules. The House of Representatives has already passed it, and now it’s the Senate’s turn. Find out more about what you can do with our Net Neutrality Defense Guide: Summer 2019 Edition.

We also need to make sure we have a patent system that supports creators and users of technology, not just patent troll lawsuits. Senators Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) have proposed draft legislation that would allow patents on abstract ideas and laws of nature. The bill isn’t yet in final form, but now is a good time to reach out to your representatives and tell them that the Tillis-Coons patent bill would be a disaster for innovation.

Lastly, remind Congress that face surveillance technology has well documented disproportionately high error rates in accurately identifying women and people of color—and even if researchers are one day able to correct these current shortcomings, the threat this pernicious and covert mass surveillance represents to Americans’ freedom of expression, religion, and association would remain. Now is the time to stand up and say no to government use of face surveillance.

Don’t Let Congress Stand Still

Town halls and meetings truly matter. When members hear repeatedly from their own constituents in person about how issues are affecting people in the district, those conversations travel with the members back to D.C. If the members think that the issue could generate enough controversy and press, local stories can influence votes, legislation, and private conversations with other members.

And, if you’re interested in getting together a group of like-minded allies to visit a town hall or event, there may even be an Electronic Frontier Alliance grassroots group in your area. The Electronic Frontier Alliance is a grassroots network of community and campus organizations across the United States working to educate others about the importance of digital rights.

However you reach out to them, this is your chance to remind Congress, face-to-face, what matters to you.

Resources:

Contact Your Senator

Contact Your Representative

Section 230 Summary

Section 215 Summary

What’s Wrong With the CASE Act

Net Neutrality Defense Guide: Summer 2019

Why We Must Stop The Tillis-Coons Patent Bill

Street-Level Surveillance: Face Recognition

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2SSg1ZR

#Deeplinks

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jessicakehoe · 5 years

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How Do We Feel About Aziz Ansari’s Return to Netflix?

The ranks here at FASHION are not filled with men. Shocking, right? But there are one or two (there are actually, literally, two). Naturally, when a question about male/female dynamics arises it’s only fair that one of them stand in for the members of his gender and provide some insight. Our last topic of conversation was about Bohemian Rhapsody’s controversial director Bryan Singer, and today we’re talking about the fact that Aziz Ansari is returning to Netflix with his first post-#MeToo comedy special. Two of our staffers—from the men’s corner, Greg Hudson, and from the women’s, Pahull Bains—talk it out.

Pahull Bains: It’s a familiar tale: men screw up, disappear for a while, and return stronger and more powerful than ever. Some men, like Trump, don’t even have to do the disappearing bit. They just get stronger and stronger right in front of our eyes. It’s like watching Mark Ruffalo transform into the Hulk, only with less grunting (and a lot less saving-the-world).

Anyway, the latest disgraced man to return is Aziz Ansari. Next week, he’s back on Netflix with a new comedy special, directed by Spike Jonze (is it just me or is that a weird choice?). Aziz Ansari: Right Now was filmed during the Brooklyn stops of his ‘Road to Nowhere’ tour, which has taken him everywhere from Mumbai to Sydney to London to Austin over the past several months. Now, we know comebacks are inevitable. But because we’re either eternal optimists or just absolute idiots, we seem to hold out hope that these disgraced men will return as chastened, repentant, more respectful versions of their earlier selves. Louis CK has already proved us wrong. So what can we expect of Aziz?

Judging by the reviews coming in from various international outlets as he makes his way across the globe, the comedian who built a career on being a woke ally is dancing around the elephant in the room instead of mining it for thoughtful, introspective material. Reviews have been mixed—Vulture called his New York show “sombre,” while the Guardian deemed his London set “combative”—but a word that comes up often is bitter. It shows up in a New Yorker review of his New Haven show, in a Cut report from a show in Massachusetts, and a Quartz piece from Connecticut.

So rather than grapple with the complex gender dynamics, social norms and patriarchal traditions that landed him on Babe.net’s homepage, he seems to have directed his energy towards criticizing his critics. Well not his critics necessarily but in general the “really hardcore woke people” trying to outdo each other in a “secret progressive Candy Crush” game. In short, he’s angry with people for being angry, instead of taking a beat to think about why.

I’m not quite sure what to expect of this documentary of his Brooklyn shows but considering he knew they were being taped, I’m betting he brought a fair bit of introspection and penitence into this one. Because when you’re plotting your return to the small screen for the first time after a scandal of this magnitude, you make damn sure that you look good. What do you think? Or rather, what are you expecting to see?

Greg Hudson: I’m not looking for points or anything, but when I have an internet-based written discussion with a co-worker, I like to read their thoughts before responding. I know it’s not required–after all, listening before we speak isn’t really something most men “do”– but I’m glad I did. Because this is hella interesting!

Aziz Ansari’s inclusion in the #MeToo narrative was always ambiguous: some people–and not just dudes–saw it as a sign that the movement was overreaching and overcorrecting, whereas as others saw it as an opportunity to call out and discuss the more insidious, banal side of misogyny that allows men not to think about their partner’s comfort and pleasure, so long as they don’t explicitly shout NO TOUCHING! Even those who were ready to cancel Aziz along with all the other MeToo Men would begrudgingly admit that what he did was in a different category than what Weinstein, or even Louis did. But…there was still a shadow cast over him.

What I find so interesting is that, more than a year later, Aziz Ansari is apparently still up for interpretation. (Granted, that’s true of literally everything in the world: it’s all subject to individual interpretation and meaning). Maybe we read different reviews of the same events, but I think we saw a lot of the same stuff, and yet our conclusions are not the same.

When I read about shows from his tour, sure the writer mentioned that she sensed “a bitterness emanating from the stage,” but I wonder how much that was confirmation bias. I wasn’t there, nor do I know what the writer’s beliefs were going in that she was looking to confirm. But, for me, the lines that stood out from that review were the ones that seemed to contradict the idea he was traveling down the same path as Louis. Namely: “Unlike Louis C.K., who seems to have given up on trying to win back the affections of people who wrote him off… Ansari’s set had moments of genuine contemplation.”

For me, who (full disclosure) felt that Aziz didn’t deserve to be in the #MeToo conversation at all [and we can totally re-open that discussion if you’d like!], it sounds like the theme of the show is totally appropriate. “The set revolved around the question of cultural forgiveness, and the idea that we’re all flawed people who make mistakes and that the knee-jerk ‘cancel culture’ that we all participate in only serves to exacerbate divisions.” Isn’t that an entirely appropriate angle to take? It’s not claiming innocence, nor is it raging bitterly against progressive politics. It’s pointing out a social issue that is surprisingly hard to address: people who pride themselves on doing the right thing have an almost impossible time admitting that they are actually doing harm.

And yet, more and more stories are coming out about the real world pain and disproportionate punishment that arises from cancel culture. I don’t think talking about that, especially if it’s with humour and humility (which his sets are, according to the reviews), should be seen as bitterness. Nor should we see this as an example of how naively, foolishly forgiving we are to men who screw up.

We all talked about how the danger with #MeToo was that there was neither a process in place to adjudicate complaints, or to provide a path to redemption. (Actually, even saying that sounded like a defense of bad behaviour in the moment). If we don’t allow someone like Aziz, who never denied his actions, who apologized both publicly and privately, and who clearly had made being an ally not just a talking point in his comedy, but a part of how he worked, the freedom or space to “come back,” then is the movement really about justice?

PB: I feel like his take on the current culture of “cancelling” people would be stronger if he actually acknowledged his place in it. I don’t think we can hope for any progress if we sweep things under the rug or try to address things in blanket terms rather than specific ones. I know we both agree that what’s being lost in present-day discourse is nuance, and how can you have nuance without specifics? I also find it odd for a comedian who very publicly mines the personal and private (talking about his grandmother’s Alzheimers, his immigrant experience etc) to suddenly take a giant step back from the personal at this crucial moment. As a person who’s a medium-level fan of Aziz’s (I really enjoyed Master of None but haven’t seen much else that he’s been in), I think I would admire and respect him a whole lot more if he addressed all of this straight up, if he talked about how cancel culture suddenly got real for him when the Babe piece came out, and how it made him think about wokeness being taken to an extreme. (As well as his own, former, place in our culture as a woke poster boy.) I guess what I’m saying is I’d love to hear from him why he thinks he doesn’t deserve to be cancelled, instead of just railing nebulously against the system that might be trying to do so. (And I don’t even agree that it is!)

A couple of reviews mention Aziz briefly touching upon the experience with Grace: “Ansari recalled a conversation in which a friend told him it made him rethink every date he’s been on: “If that has made not just me but other guys think about this, and just be more thoughtful and aware and willing to go that extra mile, and make sure someone else is comfortable in that moment, that’s a good thing.””

Now I’d love to hear him riffing more on that. You mentioned how Aziz had made being an ally a focal part of his work, and I’m curious: how do you see him continuing to be a feminist ally if he doesn’t publicly—through his comedy, which is the easiest way to reach millions of his male fans—address what he’s learned and how he may have changed? If all his fans take away from these comedy sets is that it’s the people who are wrong for overreacting, that’s not correcting anything at all is it? I just don’t see how he’s going to hold on to his woke badge if he refuses to engage meaningfully—head on—with this issue.

GH: Obviously, this is all hypothetical at this point, since we’re basing our opinions about a comedy special we haven’t seen on a handful of small write ups that describe snippets of new material that may or may not have survived long enough to be in the show. So, we don’t know if he digs deeper into that specific event, or his general complicity in a patriarchal society. Maybe he does and it’s masterful!

But, my question is: why is his woke card at risk? Divorced from the social context of the time, what must he address, reckon or wrestle with? To me, this a reminder of the fungibility of memory. Tests have shown (I know because I spent about ten minutes Googling it) that people will still make inferences and judgements based on misinformation, even after they’ve been told that the information they were given was inaccurate.

So, if a group of subjects were told about a house fire, and then told about how there were highly flammable paints and chemicals in the garage before the fire started, they understandably infer that those paints had a hand in the fire. Interestingly, and kind of distressingly, even after subjects were told that at the time of the fire those paints had been removed (so they definitely weren’t a catalyst), subjects still surmised that the fire was probably caused by those damn paints and things.

While Aziz’s story was unfolding, there was a general acceptance that this wasn’t as serious as all the other stories, but that acceptance started feeling as genuine as “I’m not racist, but…”. Aziz isn’t as bad as Louis, but….

And so now, that’s how we remember the story. We know he didn’t do anything super serious, but it all happened at the same time, and we remember the outrage and so…now Aziz has to be a proxy–or at least a pilot–for every other man who has been shamed.

Still, one might argue that the conversation about entitlement, consent, communication and sexual privilege needed to happen, and so any negative consequences experienced by Aziz was justified (and likely negligible). I think that’s probably true–or rather, I believe the people who take this stance. But if that’s the case, then it shouldn’t be about Aziz, and whether he’s grown now.

Stipulated that you may not be able to write in Aziz’s voice, what does him reckoning with his actions even look like? I’ve started to notice, as we talk about presidential candidates and their personal and professional histories, that when a pundit says that X will really have to reckon with Y, what they really mean is that Y should disqualify X. The idea of reckoning is so vague as to be meaningless. When we don’t have a firm definition of what “reckoning” looks like, let alone when it is done sufficiently, then the whole process becomes futile in its subjectivity.

Yes, there is the lesson men need to learn about explicit consent and communication, but more broadly, everyone can look at their willingness to pile on strangers while giving themselves a pass, and see something untenable and unjust.

PB: One major thing I think we tend to forget when we talk about how/whether public figures should atone for misdeeds/misbehaviours is the fact that they’re public figures. They don’t owe us any explanations but by this point they should be damn well used to being asked for them. (You wrote that if a friend had done the same thing, I’d assume he’d wrestled with it enough but no I certainly wouldn’t, unless he explicitly told me so.) So since we’re not all best buds with Aziz, and he’s not telling us any of this over a glass of scotch, we expect him to address it on stage. Because when you’re a public figure whose career is built on engaging candidly and irreverently with both what’s going on in the world and what’s going on in your life, it seems particularly disingenuous to just ignore a scandal that you’re at the centre of. Don’t you think by not addressing this whole thing directly, he’s basically just asking us all to pretend it didn’t happen? And the thing is, one of the reasons I want him to address it is precisely because I think he can move on from it, that it’s not disqualifying.

I feel like this is one of those instances where the actual problem isn’t as telling as your response to that problem. I, like many others, agree that this shouldn’t be conflated with the other #MeToo stories, and is emblematic of a larger, structural issue than a single man’s actions. He’s a tiny symptom of a much larger problem, and at the same time, uniquely positioned to address that problem in a way that, down the line, might even result in real change. To just ignore it seems like a huge missed opportunity.

You asked earlier at some point: “Divorced from the social context of the time, what must he address, reckon or wrestle with?” And my response is that you simply can’t divorce context from these sorts of game-changing conversations. We wouldn’t even be talking about Aziz and Grace 20 years ago — it wouldn’t have even been a story. Heck, Peter Farrelly said in a published story in the ’90s that he liked to whip his dick out at unsuspecting people and that barely registered as a blip. As our culture’s threshold for bullshit changes, so do the kinds of conversations we have, and what we accept from the men (or women) responsible for that bullshit, whether in our personal lives or public ones.

GH: I do think that the conversation that grew out of the scandal was a positive one, or at least one that was needed–more needed than I would have thought, which shows how much it was needed (Hello circular reasoning!). But if a positive thing came out of it, then why is his ‘comeback’ controversial?

PB: I don’t think it is though. I don’t think people want him to be exiled or to become a pop culture pariah. I think it’s the substance of his comeback that might be considered controversial if he just pretends the whole Babe thing never happened, or worse, says the onus is on everyone else for overreacting, not on the patriarchal culture that made it okay, for so long, to behave the way he did and not think twice about it.

GH: I think he can call out and critique cancel culture without implying that it’s society’s fault that he got in trouble. Can’t he? And based on the little snippets of his shows in some of the reviews, he’s not saying people are too sensitive. He’s saying society picks and chooses who to cancel, who to be outraged by, without consistency or accountability. And he’s saying we all do it to a certain extent. Hence the difference between people’s reaction to R. Kelly vs Michael Jackson. It’s why John Lennon, who abused women, and Led Zeppelin, Motley Crew, Guns and Roses, and hell, David Bowie who all did horrible things with and to groupies, are still beloved. It’s hypocritical. But, since we weren’t around for their misdeeds, we’re cool about overlooking them?

Normal people can make mistakes in private, they can apologize to who they offended, make restitutions as much as possible, and grow, all without people calling them out on social media. Historical people already did their misdeeds, and cultural consensus is pretty hard to change, so they often get a pass. What Aziz is saying is if we were to shine celebrity-level spotlight on any random person, we’d likely find something for which, if they were a present day celebrity, we could yell at them about. For instance: still listening to Michael Jackson. And so, if no one is perfect, it’s awfully dangerous to hold people up to a perfect standard.

I think mostly though–and this extends beyond Aziz–I don’t like the vagueness of people’s expectations. He didn’t reckon with it! But what does that mean? It’s like, people always say the most important thing in a relationship is communication. As a divorcee, I totally agree! But also, no one actually tells you, while giving you the communication advice, what that means.

PB: Yes but that’s just it. He’s not a “normal person.” He’s a public figure that “normal people” look up to and possibly even emulate. Yes, society does pick and choose who to outraged by and to what degree, but the response is still dictated by the level of the “crime” (using this term very loosely here). I think most people would agree that Aziz’s role in this whole conversation is very different from say, Weinstein or Kelly or CK. And I think that’s largely why people are hoping he addresses it; there’s not much room for defense as far as those guys go, but there is plenty of room for Aziz. I think what people are hoping for is a thoughtful take on everything that’s happened in the last year—happened to Aziz, specifically, and to our culture as a whole, as a result of that story. Like it or not, he’s at the centre of a culture-shifting conversation that’s incredibly important. It’s hard to say what him adequately “reckoning” with it would look like, but maybe we can circle back on this once we’ve actually seen the damn Netflix special?

GH: And if it isn’t good, we can just talk about John Mulaney’s specials. They are also on Netflix and not at all controversial!

The post How Do We Feel About Aziz Ansari’s Return to Netflix? appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

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rolandfontana · 5 years

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Does Community Supervision Have a Future?

The nation’s probation and parole systems, usually grouped under the category of Community Supervision, were designed to help people navigate the transition from prison back to civilian life—and become productive, law-abiding citizens.

But they are more likely to make things worse for individuals—and by extension for their families and communities—say experts who believe it’s time for the U.S. to adopt a radically different approach that treats ex-inmates with the dignity they deserve as returning citizens.

“The (U.S.) community supervision population has grown 239 percent since 1980,” says Connie Utada, who leads the community corrections work at Pew Charitable Trusts’ Public Safety Performance Project.

“It’s now over 4.5 million people. Larger than everybody who’s in jail and prison combined.”

In addition, according to research gathered in a joint effort by both Pew Charitable Trusts and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures), nearly a third of the roughly 2.3 million people on probation every year fail to successfully complete their supervision and wind up back in prison again, often not even for committing new crimes.

Connie Utada. Photo by John Ramsey/TCR

“In 2016, 350,000 people who were on probation and parole were sent to prison or jail for minor infractions or some type of rule violation,” said Utada.

Instead of helping people start over, it’s a “revolving door that actually denies (former offenders) the ability to reenter the workforce, to get stable housing, or to provide for their families,” she added.

Utada, speaking at a discussion last week at the 14th annual John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime, was joined by Vincent Schiraldi, a senior research analyst at the Columbia Justice Lab and former commissioner of New York City Probation; and Brian Lovins, Assistant Director of the Harris County (Texas) Community Supervision and Corrections Department.

All said state policymakers had generally failed to address the flaws in the community supervision system.

The problem is exemplified by states like Pennsylvania, where a 2017 report by the Council of State Governments Justice Center found that roughly one-third of prisoners in the state are in prison for probation or parole violations.

In New York, a 2018 report from the Columbia University Justice Lab found that, while the number of people imprisoned has dropped by 21 percent, the population being held for technical parole violations, such as missing an appointment with a parole officer, associating with people with felony records, or failing a drug test, has increased by 15 percent.

“Crime’s going down, the number of people on parole is going down, but the number of people being technically violated and returned to incarceration is going up,” said Vincent Schiraldi, author of the report.

The current system of probation and parole used in the U.S. is an ineffective waste of criminal justice resources and a driver of incarceration rather than an alternative to it, the speakers said.

And while some may seek to blame these numbers on some sort of animus on the part of those handling the cases, Schiraldi maintains that the culprit is due more to underfunding and bureaucratic apathy than anything truly sinister.

Apathy and Neglect

“There are thousands of probation and parole departments in America,” said Schiraldi. “These places reek of apathy and neglect.”

While working as a commissioner for New York City probation, Schiraldi says he regularly encountered distrust by judges, generally low expectations of the probation department, and all the while no one knocking on the door for change.

Those handling cases and distributing violations were “lunch pail people”—men and women who just wanted to get to retirement and were willing to go whichever way the winds were blowing.

Vincent Schiraldi. Photo by John Ramsey/TCR

“We put bureaucrats in spaces where if they revoke somebody and send them to prison nothing happens to them, but if they take a chance on someone, and it goes south, they’re screwed,” said Schiraldi.

“I could have done nothing and been fine. In an environment like that, it’s what you’d expect.”

Such neglect is dangerous and is tied to the increasing rate of people on parole and probation who are currently incarcerated for supposed technical violations, the panel was told.

A study from the Journal of Offender Rehabilitation found that parole and probation officers who failed to adhere to the standard Risk and Need principles, which are the methods used to decide the level of intensity of services based on risk levels of the offender, greatly contributed to increased recidivism rates in the states surveyed.

Schiraldi believes there are many ways to address this problem, but the simplest is to make probation departments smaller and more focused. Another is to focus on zero-based parole and zero-based budgeting, starting from nothing and justifying every person put under supervision.

By forcing departments to account for every dollar they spend, Schiraldi suggested, you force due diligence and accountability.

“Prove to me that this is the best thing we could do with the next government dollar versus efforts to improve communities focused on probation, drug treatment, or mental health,” said Schiraldi.

Yet while efforts like this might help to clear out some examples of negligence and apathy, the fact may be that supervision alone just isn’t the answer.

“Research shows there are better ways to do this.”

“Research shows there are better ways to do this, that the closer you watch or monitor somebody the more likely they are to be punished for a minor violation,” said Utada.

Therefore, Utada and Pew Charitable Trust have taken on two main initiatives:

Building a policy framework to develop a number of best practices with the focus of reducing the community supervision population, thus getting better outcomes for people on supervision, and reducing the amount of time that people are spending incarcerated for technical violations or performance violations; and

Launching a multi-state technical assistance effort to help reach meaningful reform through pre-directed and proven paths of action.

“Supervision can be more successful when it is coupled with treatment and paired and customized for somebody’s individual risk and needs,” said Utada.

“So, if somebody is a low risk to re-offend, they’ll be much more successful if they have very little involvement or connection with the correctional system. But if they are high risk to re-offend, the focus should be on finding out what drives their criminal behavior rather than just punishing it.”

For Brian Lovins, who has done extensive work in using evidence-based standards to improve juvenile and adult correctional programs, finding the driver to prevent criminal behavior, and abandoning the punitive nature of our entire criminal justice system, is the first step to fixing the problem of probation and parole in this country.

That amounts, he said, to turning the whole system upside down,.

“The way that the criminal justice system is (currently) designed, is for self-correctors,” said Lovins, who helped develop Ohio’s juvenile and adult risk assessment systems.

“From the very beginning, the expectation is that the police arrest you, put you in jail, bring you to court, punish you, and the punishment by itself is enough to stop you and make you go a different direction.”

Lovins maintains that this is a flawed concept of our criminal justice system: it does nothing to change people’s behavior.

He pointed out that while this line of reasoning may enable people who have the skills and capacity to avoid re-engaging in the behavior that got them into prison; it does little for those less fortunate.

Brian Lovins. Photo by John Ramsey/TCR

“It’s not enough for the folks that don’t have those skills, don’t have those resources, come from impoverished areas, come from families that are struggling, come from a broken school system,” said Lovins.

A 2018 report by Human Rights Watch underlined the point, observing that many probation programs bury low-income men and women in fees and costs that they are never able to meet or recover from.

And Lovins stressed that these systems also disproportionately affect people of color over white offenders in the same situations. A 2014 study by the Urban Institute found that black people on probation are more likely than whites or Hispanics to have their probation revoked.

“Our system works backwards.”

“From a probation standpoint, our system works backwards,” said Lovins.

“We give you a set of rules and we referee those rules and tell you to behave today. We have this belief that because someone in a robe sits behind a desk and tells you go forth and sin no more that people will change and become self-correctors.”

This unrealistic mentality ignores the very real circumstances that many people on probation or parole have to deal with, he said.

And whether it’s drug addiction, joblessness, social interaction issues, mental health issues, poverty, or a lack of education, Lovins maintains that the current system chooses to ignore them all and, instead, paint with a broad brush that only lands more and more of them back in jail and prison.

“We expect you to be better from day one, and we start counting against you, every time you screw up, and then at the end we look at all the marks and we fail you anyway,” said Lovins.

Probation Officer as Coach

In an effort to change these practices, Lovins endorses a probation model where, instead of a referee, a probation officer would be a coach.

While working at the University of Cincinnati’s School of Criminal Justice, he helped develop a statewide juvenile risk assessment system that encourages establishing relationships and developing pro-social skills with offenders, using positive reinforcement, and harboring a willingness to teach and adapt.

“What should happen is that by the end of supervision, by the end of this intervention, you should be better,” said Lovins.

Now, as assistant director of the Harris County Community Supervision and Corrections Department, Lovins has brought this sort of reformist approach to Texas. He reported that the strategy has so far resulted in reductions in both technical violations and law violations, and lowered recidivism rates in his county.

He suggested that implementing this approach may also help to improve and curb the kind of neglect and apathy existing in departments by holding staff members to similar ideals.

“I use the same model with our staff as I do with the folks that we serve,” said Lovins.

“Every day I tell my staff if you screw up, we’ll move on and figure out how not to do it again. And that translates to them saying that to the people that they serve. Everyone has a chance to change and grow, and we’re a learning model.”

As a result, Lovins says, his staff love coming to work; there has been less turnover and callouts from a position that, historically, offered little in the way of positive reinforcement and, instead, made them little more than a referee on the sidelines throwing flags.

“Now they get to be the coach, and they get to change people’s lives,” said Lovins.

Yet despite positive moves for reform like these, probation and parole in this country still remains a major problem with daunting hurdles for the average person to overcome.

A 2015 report by the Robina Institute estimated that people on probation or parole must comply with 18-20 different requirements a day in order to remain in good standing with the probation department. And while reform research promises improvement, some insist that they’re only focusing on the edges of the problem.

“Research mostly shows us how to get through this pathetic thing that everyone calls community supervision to a 20 percent better pathetic thing,” said Schiraldi.

And while this still counts as a step in the right direction, until underlying issues such as poverty, institutionalized racism, poor education, and mental health can be addressed and discussed as the root issues of the problem that they are, he maintains that small successes only seduce people into thinking the problem can be fixed that easily.

Instead, reformists like Schiraldi, Lovins, and Utada insist that change can only come by looking at the big picture.

“Let’s not just ask how can we get it 20 percent better,” said Schiraldi.

“Let’s ask the whole question.”

Additional Reading: “A Parole System Report Card Gives Most States Failing Grades”

Isidoro Rodriguez is a contributing writer to The Crime Report. Readers’ comments are welcome.

Does Community Supervision Have a Future? syndicated from https://immigrationattorneyto.wordpress.com/

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