Kamala Harris on Crime

     Although the number of individuals in America's prisons now tops two million, and we spend roughly $200 billion annually on responding to crime, our system is plagued with repeat offenders.
The sad fact is that two-thirds of those released from prison re-offend within two or three years. In California, we now spend more that $25 billion annually on crime--more than twice what we spend on higher education--but 70 percent of the 125,000 individuals released from our prisons each year are back behind bars within a couple of years…

     When we combine all the crimes committed each year and factor in the seriousness of those crimes, the result is best represented by a pyramid. At the very top are the worst crimes--the murders, rapes, and violent assaults that so rightly command our most intense attention. The violent crimes occupy the top section of that pyramid because they are so serious and threatening, but they also are the tip-top because they are a minority of crimes. Only a quarter of all offenders admitted to prison are violent offenders. The largest mass of the crime pyramid is the truly staggering number of nonviolent offenders. According to the FBI, 96 percent of all arrests are of nonviolent offenders. [These nonviolent crimes include, however, grand theft, public corruption, arson, burglary, and the possession of child pornography. Where do these criminals fit in the crime pyramid?]

     The problem is that we have been using only the tools best suited to combating the offenders at the top of the pyramid for the entire crime pyramid. For several decades the passage of tough laws and long sentences has created an illusion in the public's mind that public safety is best served when we treat all offenders pretty much the same way: arrest, convict, imprison, parole, and hope they learn their lesson. What the numbers say loud and clear, however, is that most nonviolent offenders are learning the wrong lesson, and in many cases, they are becoming better and more hardened criminals during their prison stays.

Kamala D. Harris, Smart on Crime, 2009 

Talent and the Creative Process

     Many writers are reluctant to talk about the creative process--that is, how and where they get their talent, ideas, and inspiration to write. Some authors deny that talent is an inborn gift while others ridicule the notion that writers have to be inspired before they can create. While there are a few who are simply incapable of writing anything decent, most people can teach themselves the craft well enough to write for publication.

     Many of the highly literate novel writers born with special literary gifts are, is some shape or form mentally ill or emotionally unstable. A good many of them are suicidal alcoholics and drug addicts. Truman Capote comes to mind.

     Perhaps having some natural ability to write and create is more common than not having it at all. The need to create probably resides in most people. When a reader tells a writer that he can't imagine how one can write a book or an article, some writers may wonder how a person couldn't produce a literary work.

    Authors like to give the impression that writing is extremely difficult, but once you get the hang of it, it's fairly easy. That's the dirty little secret. 

Writers Fear Science and Scientists Fear Writing

     Take a class of writing students in a liberal arts college and assign them to write about some aspect of science, and a pitiful moan will go around the room. "No! Not science!" the moan says. The students have a common affliction: fear of science. They were told at an early age by a chemistry or a physics teacher that they don't have "a head for science."

     Take an adult chemist or physicist or engineer and ask him or her to write a report, and you'll see something close to panic. "No! Don't make us write!" they say. They also have a common affliction: fear of writing. They were told at an early age by an English teacher that they don't have "a gift for words."

William Zinsser, On Writing Well, originally published in 1976  

No More Harry Potter Imitations

For writers, the Harry Potter effect has been twofold. On the one hand, it has been encouraging. The increased sales of children's books have been good for them, and there's more of a sense of value for children's books. But the downside to this has been that a lot of people have thought, I could write Harry Potter. They must be looking for another Harry Potter. It is so untrue. I will go on record as saying we won't see another Harry Potter for fifty years.

David Levithan in Agents, Editors, and You edited by Michelle Howry, 2002 

The FBI Indexing System

     One of the most important aspects of an FBI field office is not actually in the office: indexes. At one time, these were little more than 3 by 5 cards, maintained in scores, if not hundreds, of file cabinets in every FBI field office. For example, the New York Office of the FBI had over 7 million such cards before the system was automated. The FBI has long prided itself on information management, and under Director J. Edgar Hoover, the development of the index system was a notable first for the FBI. The Bureau had many complex rules about indexing, and laborious though it may be, it is one of the most important things an agent does. If, for example, an agent conducts an interview of a witness to a bank robbery, the person's name, address, and phone number are indexed. So, too, are the names and information developed during the course of the interview.

     This indexing is now done on a computer system, so that all FBI field offices share the same information. If, years later, only the phone number came up in another investigation, it could be traced back to the original interview. Indeed, many cases have been made or advanced over the years through the ability of the FBI to retrieve information from its own files. [When I was in the bureau, each criminal complaint that came across an agent's desk had been "indexed." That is, all names, vehicles, and addresses mentioned in the complaint that were in the index file were underlined in red. Quite often this cross referencing provided an agent with his first lead in the case.]

Joseph W. Koletar, The FBI Career Guide, 2006 

Academic Writing: Pretentious and Unreadable

     Writing comes in many forms and styles. The most creative authors write novels. The writers of highly readable narrative nonfiction are close behind. Next comes the writers of nonfiction books followed by a handful of newspaper journalists. Most writing, however, consists of everyday exposition in the form of reports, letters, memos, and even tweets. The worst, most unreadable writing is produced by academics. Even the best academic writing is pretentious, jargon-laced and hard to read.

     The following example of this horrible form of exposition was published in a respected scholarly journal:

"Analysts of global integration have been rightly concerned with elucidating global inequalities. But increasingly interconnectivity has also created possibilities for seemingly marginal people to affect larger patterns of interrelation. By concentrating on how economic power is deployed by dominant global actors, analysts of globalizing processes have largely overlooked the ways in which quotidian acts such as consumer demand across the globe influence economic relations, however asymmetrical these relationships might be."

     It would take a team of brilliant codebreakers to figure out what the writer of the above paragraph is actually saying. Whatever it is, it could probably be stated in a simple sentence. And it would be quite banal.

High School Kids Don't Learn How to Write

     The other night I took a look at my daughter's English essay and suggested that she try excising the words "extremely," "totally," and "incredibly" whenever they appeared in her prose. She did this and was surprised to discover that not only were the intensifiers superfluous, but that her sentences were stronger without them…

     Modern educators often talk of wanting to encourage "critical thinking" in students. A crucial part of that mission is--or should be--teaching young people how to organize and present ideas in lucid prose. Most people will not end up writing essays or novels for a living, but at some point they will want to write a job application, send a condolence letter, or compose an email to a colleague explaining why something went wrong at work. Knowing how to write--understanding the basics of what used to be called "rhetoric"--still matters, even in the Internet age. So it's a sad thing that in a great many American pubic high schools, writing instruction amounts to little more than inculcating the dreary requirements of the SAT essay.

     No one at my daughter's school had even mentioned to her that the use of the word "incredibly" is subject to the law of diminishing returns. No one talked to her intelligently about structure or style. Instead, she has been given a single, graceless formula for writing a book report and told that any departure form it will result in the automatic subtraction of marks. [Today, many teachers have abandoned the idea of giving students the tools to think on their own. Instead, kids are being taught what to think and to believe. Education should not be about politically indoctrinating functional illiterates. In some school districts it would be better for students to stay at home and read books.]

Zoe Heller, The New York Times Book Review, August 24, 2014 

Representing a Guilty Client

Whenever I appear on talk shows, I am criticized for representing guilty clients. "How can you sleep at night," I am asked, "when you help someone who you know is guilty get back on the street?" Replying that I'm part of an adversarial system barely satisfies an audience fearful of crime and fed up with what it perceives as legal gamesmanship.

Alan Dershowitz, Letters to a Young Lawyer, 2001

Writing The Second Novel

Writing the second novel does feel different. I'm more confident and enjoying it more because I feel less anxious about the time I am spending on it. A first novel is such an exercise in hope and obsession, early mornings and late nights, trying to justify your time to your family and yourself. Now there's none of that. I also know so much more about the craft of writing and how to accomplish my goals.

Tara Conklin, npr.org, May 16, 2014 

Writer's Workshops and Classes

Blooming writers really do not know what to expect when they sign up for a workshop or a creative-writing class. Some want to learn to write, or to write better. Others have been writing a great deal for a long time and want some feedback. These are realistic goals. A certain kind of person finds writing classes and workshops to be like camp, and just wants to hang out with all these other people, maybe with a writer he or she respects, to get and give response and encouragement, and to hear how other people tell their stories. Some people want other people with whom to share the disappointments and rejection letters and doldrums. A lot of people like to work on other people's writing because it helps them figure out what they themselves love in the written word, as well as what doesn't work for them. And others want feedback from people who aren't quite friends or editors but who will be realistic and honest and helpful.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, 1994