Prisoner reentry as myth and ceremony

The carceral boom in post-Civil Rights America results not from profit-seeking but from state-crafting. Accordingly, we must slay the chimera of the “Prison Industrial Complex” and forsake its derived tale of the “Prisoner Reentry Industry.” This murky economic metaphor is doubly misleading: first, most released convicts experience not reentry but ongoing circulation between the prison and their dispossessed neighborhoods; second, the institutions entrusted with supervising them are not market operators but elements of the bureaucratic field as characterized by Pierre Bourdieu. Post-custodial supervision is a ceremonial component of “prisonfare,” which complements “workfare” through organizational isomorphism, and partakes of the neoliberal reengineering of the state. Reentry outfits are not an antidote to but an extension of punitive containment as government technique for managing problem categories and territories in the dualizing city. To capture the glaring economic irrationality and bureaucratic absurdities of the oversight of felons behind as well as beyond bars, our theoretical inspiration should come not from the radical critique of capitalism but from the neo-Durkheimian sociology of organization and the neo-Weberian theory of the state as a classifying and stratifying agency.     

The expanding prisoner reentry industry

The prisoner reentry industry (PRI) has become a major part of the Social Control Industrial Complex. As with the Prison Industrial Complex, the PRI is not just a collection of institutions, organizations, and interest groups (both public and private); it is also a state of mind. Developing and facilitating programs and services for the formerly incarcerated have become a huge “cash-cow,” producing profits for the PRI at the expense of the taxpayer, while doing little to link the formerly incarcerated person to the social capital and human skills necessary to become a “citizen.” Data that include the voices of the formerly incarcerated, members of their families, and criminal justice practitioners suggest that a person’s level of success during their “personal reentry experience” varies in large part, by the individual parole officer they are assigned to and the number and types of programs they are required to participate in. Furthermore, their quality of life after release and their level of success is determined in large part by the program administrators managing those “for-profit companies” and “non-profit/for-profit agencies,” that supervise parolee programs. The argument here is that there must be a better system for monitoring the activities of those organizations that are in the business of facilitating prisoner reentry-related services. A process of accountability that will ensure that organizations part of the PRI are in fact providing services in the manner that was stated and agreed upon during their request for funding. The most important tool for ending this cycle lies in creating employment opportunities for the formerly incarcerated and empowering them to access those resources afforded all citizens. Consequently, if those agencies and organizations in the business of facilitating prisoner reentry were successful at making available the services they argue they do provide, members of these organizations would work themselves out of a job; that would be a valid indicator of organizational success.     

The PRI: employing the unemployable

This essay draws attention to the Prison Reentry Industry’s potential to create unprecedented employment opportunities for formerly incarcerated individuals. Situated at the intersection of money, programming, and state-sponsored surveillance, the Prison Reentry Industry (PRI) is notable for its implication in prolonging and deepening people’s entrenchment in the criminal justice/reentry matrix; however, the burgeoning of a “reentry industry” also ensures the growth of employment positions tailored perfectly to the experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals. The PRI’s production of significant employment opportunities for certain members of the formerly incarcerated population turns social science research on incarceration and employment on its head. It is by now almost conventional wisdom that a criminal history stands as a barrier to employment, but the PRI’s potential to create a substantial job market for formerly incarcerated people may engender an extraordinary outcome in which a criminal record represents for some, the factor leading to entrée into the ranks of the employed.     

Evaluating “Hot Spots” of Soil Contamination (Redux)

Every day, thousands of soil samples are collected from properties suspected of being contaminated. The samples are sent to laboratories where the chemical constituents are quantified. Frequently, one or more samples are identified as constituting a “hot spot” of soil contamination. The consequences of such a determination—more sampling, more remediation, more reporting—are often quite expensive. Yet despite the often costly consequences of identifying a “hot spot,” there appears no supportable methodology for objectively deciding which spots are “hot” and which are “not.” This can lead to situations where sampling episodes are required to demonstrate that there is not a problem, even though just exactly what would comprise a “problem” is not particularly clear and sometimes is not stated. The authors provide a review and analysis of common and published information concerning “hot spots.” They then present a different point of view about “hot spots” from those in common practice, a point of view that will challenge many environmental professionals to reconsider how they evaluate sampling results.     

Defining and evaluating the ecological restoration economy

For decades, industry groups and many media outlets have propagated the notion that environmental protection is bad for business. However, missing from this public debate has been a detailed accounting of the U.S. economic output and employment that are created through conservation, restoration, and mitigation actions, which we call the “Restoration Economy.” In this paper, we review related literature, including 14 local and state‐level case studies of privately funded environmental restoration projects. We also review federal and state government programs that fund restoration throughout the United States, revealing the complex nature of this sector. We find growing evidence that the restoration industry not only protects public environmental goods but also contributes to national economic growth and employment, supporting as many as 33 jobs per $1 million invested, with an employment multiplier of between 1.48 and 3.8 (the number of jobs supported by every restoration job) and an output multiplier of between 1.6 and 2.59 (multiplier for total economic output from investments). The existing literature also shows that restoration investments lead to significant positive economic and employment impacts and appear to have particularly localized benefits, which can be attributed to the tendency for projects to employ local labor and materials. While these initial figures are promising, the extent of environmental restoration activities and benefits at a national level is not yet well understood. Our findings reveal the need for a methodological framework for more accurately and broadly estimating the size of the U.S. restoration sector and its impact on the U.S. economy.     

Evolutionary search: Gradients and information

To better understand evolution one might view evolution as a search algorithm proceeding through a search space. The search method implemented by reproduction with mutation and selection of the fit does not perform efficiently on many search spaces. Characteristics of the search space are critically important to the effectiveness of the search algorithm. The “gradients” of and the “information” in a search space are used in this paper to study performance of “evolutionary” search algorithms.     

Expanding the labor theory of value

This paper revisits debates over the labor theory of value in the 1970s and 1980s and proposes an expansion and revision for the neoliberal era. It draws on three empirical cases of social movements grappling with contemporary changes in the societal division of labor and argues that they can best be understood as “revaluation” projects seeking to bring recognition to aspects of the economy that are necessary for its long-term sustainability but are not “counted” as important.     

Reprogramming cell fates: reconciling rarity with robustness

The stunning possibility of “reprogramming” differentiated somatic cells to express a pluripotent stem cell phenotype (iPS, induced pluripotent stem cell) and the “ground state” character of pluripotency reveal fundamental features of cell fate regulation that lie beyond existing paradigms. The rarity of reprogramming events appears to contradict the robustness with which the unfathomably complex phenotype of stem cells can reliably be generated. This apparent paradox, however, is naturally explained by the rugged “epigenetic landscape” with valleys representing “preprogrammed” attractor states that emerge from the dynamical constraints of the gene regulatory network. This article provides a pedagogical primer to the fundamental principles of gene regulatory networks as integrated dynamic systems and reviews recent insights in gene expression noise and fate determination, thereby offering a formal framework that may help us to understand why cell fate reprogramming events are inherently rare and yet so robust.     

Differentiation,ageing, and terminal differentiation: A semantic analysis

The largely unsolved problems in the theoretical analysis of differentiation and ageing involve a substantial component of linguistic (semantic) difficulties. Some of these are simple traps of ambiguity, resulting from metaphorical or analogical employment of established terms—for example, “terminal differentiation” (loss of division potential in vitro) as a borrowing from “differentiation” as used by developmental biologists, or “commitment” by analogy with “determination”. Some difficulties represent a failure to adopt (at least provisionally) an operational (empirical) view—for example, failure to ask what is the nature of the evidence for the view that a fertilized ovum is totipotential, or to scrutinize the evidence for the view that cells “terminally differentiated” in vitro in a conventional medium are in fact moribund under all conditions, or to examine more closely the view that the differentiated state and the cycling state are mutually exclusive.With respect to the problem of ageing, we review some of the critical experiments on ”terminal differentiation” or “clonal senescence”. We then proceed to consider some of the models that have been proposed, including a molecular model proposed by the author which appears to overcome some of the objections to other models. Some of the models exemplify the results of what are ultimately semantic vices.The problems with which these remarks began should indeed yield to the immense and novel resources of molecular biology. But the development of complete analyses demands not only good luck and delicate technique but also critical semantic clarity and severity. Given the best tools, we shall solve major theoretical problems only if we understand quite fully what problem it is that we are trying to solve—and the history of science illustrates that this is not as elementary a matter as it sounds. For the working scientist semantics (and indeed all philosophy of science) is not an indulgence or a frill, but a basic technical resource.     

Strategies in bioreactor performance studies

As bioreactor performance is the result of the interactions between physiology and physical transport phenomena an adequate strategy for design and analysis of bioreactors has to be based on this interaction network. The paper summarizes this systematic approach based on a holistic view called “integrating strategy”. The strategy is outlined for the case of baker's yeast processing, where especially the comparability of kinetic models including the concept of “dynamic flux” is critically discussed showing that macro- and microkinetics have similar potential in describing bioprocesses according to the formal macroapproach.     

The prisoner reentry industry

The Prisoner Reentry Industry found its beginnings in the recognition that men and women who were being released from prison continued to need assistance in their transition process. Depending upon the individual needs of each person, this determined the extent of what type of assistance needed. Within a short period of time it was determined that the greatest assistance was needed in the area of housing and employment. However, once a person completed this transition phrase that was usually understood to be about three years, the following questions arise: when does the reentry phase end? When does society allow the ex-offender to move on with their lives? Even when secure employment has been maintained, when other areas of the individuals’ life are functioning “at least like everyone else in society”, when does the reentry stop and the ex-offender allowed to enter into mainline society? This article attempts to show that we have not done a good job of allowing the ex-offender to move from the phase of prisoner reentry to the phase of contributor in our society.     

ONTOGENY OF THE FOLIAR SCLEREIDS IN NYMPHAEA ODORATA

Gaudet, John. (U. Rhode Island, Kingston.) Ontogeny of the foliar sclereids in Nymphaea odorata . Amer. Jour. Bot. 47(7): 525–532. Illus. I960.—The “diffused” idioblastic sclereids develop in the leaves of Nymphaea odorata Ait. during periods when leaves are forming on the shoot apex, and they are initiated by cells which are differentiated from other cells of the fundamental tissue by nuclear size. The ontogeny of the sclereids is similar in most cases, but differences are apparent among petiolar, laminar and stipular types, especially, when the adult morphology is considered. At maturity, the sclereids are usually pitted in the central portion, and they do not show “polarity” in the leaf or orientation near the tracheary elements, which occur in the same tissue. The “spicule-like” protuberances and the angular cross-sectional shape of the stipular sclereids are interpreted as evidence that growth of these sclereids was restricted as compared to other types of sclereids which were not restricted.     

Paraphyly,ancestors, and the goals of taxonomy: A botanical defense of cladism

Cronquist (1987) criticizes cladism for its rejection of paraphyletic groups, which he would retain if he feels they are “conceptually useful.” We argue that paraphyletic higher taxa are artificial classes created by taxonomists who wish to emphasize particular characters or phenetic “gaps,” and that formal recognition of such taxa conveys a misleading picture of common ancestry and character evolution. In our view, classifications should accurately reflect the nested hierarchy of monophyletic groups that is the natural outcome of the evolutionary process. Such systems facilitate the study of evolution and provide an efficient summary of character distributions. Paraphyletic groups, such as “prokaryotes,” “green algae,” “bryophytes,” and “gymnosperms,” should be abandoned, as continued recognition of such groups will only serve to retard progress in understanding evolution. Contrary to Cronquist’s (1987) assertions, cladistic theory is not at odds with standard views on speciation and the existence of ancestors. Groups of interbreeding organisms can continue to exist after giving rise to descendant species, and there are several ways in which such groups, whether extant or extinct, can be incorporated into cladistic classification. In contrast, paraphyletic higher taxa are neither cohesive (integrated by gene flow) nor whole, do not serve as ancestors, and are unacceptable in the phylogenetic system. Fossils may be of great value in assessing phylogenetic relationships and are readily accommodated in cladistic classification. Cladistic studies are helping to answer major questions about plant evolution, and we anticipate increased efforts to develop a truly phylogenetic system.     

Disturbances,organisms and ecosystems: a global change perspective

The present text exposes a theory of the role of disturbances in the assemblage and evolution of species within ecosystems, based principally, but not exclusively, on terrestrial ecosystems. Two groups of organisms, doted of contrasted strategies when faced with environmental disturbances, are presented, based on the classical r‐K dichotomy, but enriched with more modern concepts from community and evolutionary ecology. Both groups participate in the assembly of known animal, plant, and microbial communities, but with different requirements about environmental fluctuations. The so‐called “civilized” organisms are doted with efficient anticipatory mechanisms, allowing them to optimize from an energetic point of view their performances in a predictable environment (stable or fluctuating cyclically at the scale of life expectancy), and they developed advanced specializations in the course of evolutionary time. On the opposite side, the so‐called “barbarians” are weakly efficient in a stable environment because they waste energy for foraging, growth, and reproduction, but they are well adapted to unpredictably changing conditions, in particular during major ecological crises. Both groups of organisms succeed or alternate each other in the course of spontaneous or geared successional processes, as well as in the course of evolution. The balance of “barbarians” against “civilized” strategies within communities is predicted to shift in favor of the first type under present‐day anthropic pressure, exemplified among others by climate warming, land use change, pollution, and biological invasions.     

Influence of Restricted Suckling and Level of Feed Supplementation on Postpartum Reproductive Performance of Zebu and Crossbred Cattle in the Semi-Arid Tropics

This study was carried out in central Tanzania on a group of 45 Zebu and 37 crossbred cows which were 4 to 10 years old. At calving time, the animals were allocated to one of the 4 treatment groups. In addition to free access to grazing for all cows in the study, in group H: AR (n = 18), cows were fed a high level of concentrate supplementation (4kg/day) and calves were artificially reared; in group H:RS (n = 24), cows were fed a high level of concentrate supplementation (4kg/day) and calves were only allowed restricted suckling up until the weaning age of 6 months. In group L:AR (n = 23) cows were fed a low level of concentrate supplementation (2kg/day) and calves were artificially reared; and in group L:RS (n = 17) cows were fed a low level of concentrate supplementation (2kg/day) and calves were only allowed restricted suckling up until the weaning age of 6 months. Milk progesterone was used as a means of determining the postpartum resumption interval (PRI) and the interval from parturition to conception (PCI). The overall PRI was 47.4 ± 0.4 days and was significantly affected by breed but not by calving season, with crossbred cows exhibiting a shorter PRI than Zebu cows. The effect of the treatments was significant, with cows in the group H:AR displaying a significantly shorter PRI than those in the other groups, while cows in group L:RS showed a significantly longer PRI than those in the other groups. The overall PCI was 149.5 ±3.7 days, and was not significantly affected by breed or calving season. The effect of the treatments was significant, with cows in the group H:AR having a significantly shorter PCI than cows in the other groups, while cows in group L:RS showed a significantly longer PCI than those in the other groups. Crossbred cows had higher live weights at calving (299.4 kg) than Zebu cows (272.6 kg), while all cows gained weight during the first 3 months after calving. The treatments had a significant effect on weight gain, with cows in the group H:AR gaining significantly more weight than those in the other groups. Cows which had high live weights at calving exhibited significantly shorter PRI and PCI than the lighter cows. Animals which had gained more than 5 kg during the first month after calving, or which had gained more than 8 kg during the first 3 months after calving, showed significantly shorter PRI and PCI than cows which had gained less weight. The results show that the calf rearing system and the level of feed supplementation interact with each other and can influence the postpartum anoestrous period in Zebu and Zebu crossbred cattle. Increasing the level of nutrition in restricted suckling cows tended to improve the postpartum anoestrous period, but the positive effects of supplementation could not completely compensate for the negative effects of suckling.     

Ethnographic surreality,possession and the unconscious

In the Second Manifesto of Surrealism, issued by André Breton in 1929, surrealism was described as “a total recuperation of our psychic strength by a means of none other than vertiginous descent into ourselves, systematic illumination of the hidden places and progressive darkening of the other places, a perpetual walk in the forbidden zone”. Surrealism sought to represent the unconscious and forbidden zones of the psyche, of the body, of the noumenal world within, which offered access, for surrealists, to energies and intuitions repressed by “civilized” modes of perception. For Jean Rouch, the significance of surrealism, of automatic writing and ciné‐transe, rested in the potential escape they offered from the formal constraints of conventional film and of conventional perception and observation. In his celebration of ciné‐transe, and of the technological apparatus that makes it possible, it is possible to detect his desire for a freeing‐up of the constraints of consciousness—a desire to “write with the body”, to dream, to tap the unexplored power of the unconscious in its overturning of “reality”, of system, and of convention. As a phaneroscopic “wide‐angle lens”, surreality aimed to document the scientifically unexplainable, the immense experiential overload of ritual possession. It attempted to make visible, in the movement between observation and participation and across disjunctive points of view; the crossings‐over into the unconscious world by which possessed Songhay dancers gained access to powers of phaneroscopic perception. By adopting filmic techniques which follow the surrealist practice of creating “verbal and visual collage”, in which randomly‐generated images, emerging out of a trance‐like state (of “automatic writing” or "ciné‐transe"), are juxtaposed in indeterminate and polyphonic relations with each other in an attempt to disturb or destroy patterns of perception which are confining, rationalistic, linear, or restricted to conscious phenomena, Rouch believed he could create powerful representations of the unknowable. This paper relates the phaneroscopic practice of ethnographic surrealism to psychoanalytic models of the unconscious. In a discussion of Rouch's interpretation of the Hauka spirit cult in his film Les Maîtres Fous, the paper argues that the neo‐Freudian paradigm which allowed him to depict the Sohghay's weekend Hauka rites as a parodic reversion to “savagery” (which both reversed the hierarchy of colonizer/colonized and enabled participants to experience a therapeutic release from the traumas of colonization) has been challenged by Lacanian and post‐Lacanian “re‐readings” of Freud that call into question the extent to which the unconscious can be equated with a pre‐linguistic state characterized by disjunctive “primitive” and “instinctive” energies. The surrealist longing for a rupture of the symbolic order of Western rationalism and a return to the “imaginary order” of the unconscious is confounded in the Lacanian conception of the unconscious as a zone inhabited by the “discourse of the Other”. However, the work of Gillès Deleuze and Félix Guanari [1977] provides a means of conceptualizing the unconscious in terms that avoid simplistic binary logic (phenomenon/noumenon; signifier/signified; subject/object; conscious/unconscious; civilization/savagery). The unconscious is not the “unrepresentable” Other of consciousness; it is a schizophrenic phaneron, a signifying “machine”, a transgressive producer of “group fantasy”. Rejecting both Freud's Oedipal model (the unconscious as primal imagery or “ghostly signifieds"), and the Lacanian notion of the unconscious (as a play of “empty signifiers"). Deleuze and Guattari argue that the unconscious cannot be accounted for in terms of the individual child and its entry into language any more than it can be conceived of as the domain of the primitive. On the contrary, the unconscious is constituted as “group fantasy”, as collective public memory which need not be reduced to elemental (Oedipal) signifiers: “all delirium possesses a world‐historical, political and racial content”. The schizophrenic embodies the public nature of unconscious meaning, since schizophrenia is primarily a communication disorder in which an individual never sees himself in terms of a linguistically‐generated “selfhood”, and fails to adopt the “false” identity which is offered to him in the language of the Other. Schizophrenia is characterized by a refusal to treat some meanings as superior to others, to remain within the bounds of a stable identity, or to distinguish between material (noumenal) things and actions and their (phenomenal) meanings. The schizophrenic unconscious treats all experience as signs, registering language in the same way as the body registers physical stimuli. Thus “meanings in the unconscious are simply meanings as workings of the body” [Harland 1987:174–175]. The schizophrenic as a model for the unconscious holds several implications for those interested in representing the experiential power of public rituals, for the public meanings in circulation during such rituals are material and noumenal, and are registered on the bodies of the dancers as they transgress boundaries and pass beyond consciousness. Rouch's surreality attempted to inscribe this unconscious production of public meaning as it was manifested in the movements of the ritual and in the movements of the camera‐body.     

Evidence concerning the morphogenesis of saccular receptors in the bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana)

A dichotomy of hair-cell types has been found in the bullfrog sacculus, and considerable evidence supports the view that one type (“peripheral”) is transformed during macular growth to the other type (“central”). Between the periphery and the center of the macula, one finds a gradation of form from “peripheral” to “central” type. Occasionally in adults and more often in stage-26 tadpoles one finds the presumably younger peripheral type of hair cell occurring well beyond the limits of the macula proper. The apparent morphogenic sequence for saccular hair cells is (1) development of a kinocillum on an endolymphatic epithelial cell, (2) gradual transformation of microvilli into stereocilia, (3) growth of the stereocilia and development of kinociliary bulb, (4) achievement of final size and form.     

Zur Frage der Ambar

The social categories “Maya” and “mestizo” have been applied to denote the Yucatec Mayan people in Mexico. This article examines the cluster of perceived attributes (schemata) evoked by the terms and how they relate to each other. It shows that there is an incongruency between them along the lines of local and academic categorization, which is an implication of the different social spaces in which they arise. In spite of the incongruency and the cultural plurality evoked by their usage, the author argues that the people of Yucatán share a single culture.     

Export agriculture,transnational farmworkers,and labor resistance in the Mexico–US borderlands

This article discusses the system of export agriculture in northern Mexico and its impact on transnational farmworkers employed in both sides of the US–Mexico border. Since the late 1990s, a transnational industry producing fresh produce for consumer markers in the USA has taken hold in the San Quintin Valley in Baja California, transforming the economic and social fabric of this border region. This industry has generated a new labor regime predicated upon the employment of a flexible and cheap source of indigenous workers from the poorest states in southern Mexico. I examine the contours of this regime, the forms of labor resistance it has elicited, and the new types of labor migration it has generated by Mexican workers to the USA. As I show, indigenous farm laborers engage in novel forms of labor and political protests to claim for their rights. These developments, I argue, speak of the class formation of transnational farmworkers who, mobilizing local and transnationally, combine traditional labor demands with wider claims for their civil and political rights.