Recent Articles

The Arts Fuse • 3rd January 2023

Book Review: "Way Down in the Hole" -- The Agonies of Solitary Confinement

Some readers may be surprised to learn that a high percentage of the men and women who spend time in solitary confinement have been diagnosed with severe mental illness.

The Arts Fuse • 3rd December 2023

Book Review: "Fallen Angel" -- Edgar Allan Poe's "Black Electricity of Guilt"

Robert Morgan has written a fascinating reconsideration of the life of Edgar Allan Poe.

Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Robert Morgan. Louisiana State University Press, 382 pages.

Part of Edgar Allan Poe’s grand achievement, according to Robert Morgan, is “exposing the Imp of the Perverse in us all.” No wonder the author felt that, despite the considerable attention Poe has received from biographers, critics, and readers delighted to be scared silly by stories like “The Tell-Tale

The Arts Fuse • 18th October 2023

Book Review: "Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class"

Dan Canon provides not only the statistics but powerful stories to demonstrate the extent to which plea bargaining has bankrupted the justice system.

Pleading Out: How Plea Bargaining Creates a Permanent Criminal Class by Dan Canon. Basic Books, 324 pages.

Perhaps the most dramatic statistic in Pleading Out is that 97% of criminal cases in this country don’t go to trial. They are dealt with via plea bargains.

The United States leads the league in that regard, just as we lead the industrialize

The Arts Fuse • 5th October 2023

Book Review: "That's a Pretty Thing to Call It" -- Prose & Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions

These essays and poems present incarcerated men and women as nothing more or less than our fellow humans.

That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Institutions, Leigh Sugar, Editor. New Village Press, 289 pages.

Working with incarcerated students presents distinctive challenges. The people who’ve contributed to this collection of essays and poems struggle with the debilitating notion that by meeting with their students in prison, they’re helping to mak

The Arts Fuse • 3rd October 2023

Book Review: "American Purgatory" -- Prison as a Form of Social Control

American Purgatory is the sort of book reactionary politicians and organizations are trying to ban. It’s full of evidence that many of the attitudes and conditions prevalent in this country from its founding were racist, bigoted, even genocidal.

American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration by Benjamin Weber. The New Press, 284 pages.

Much of American Purgatory is concerned with the practice of incarceration over the years in places other than the United States. Ben

The Arts Fuse • 8th August 2023

Book Review: "Free Them All" -- The Case for Abolishing Prisons

Free Them All’s analysis of the broken prison system and the obstacles facing those determined to find solutions combines scholarly discipline with a powerful, emotional appeal for justice.

Free Them All: A Feminist Call To Abolish the Prison System by Gwenola Ricordeau. Translated by Emma Ramadan & Tom Roberge. Verso, 182 pages.

Throughout her argument that prisons should be abolished, Sociologist Gwenola Ricordeau reminds the reader that “penal abolition can only be ‘unfinished.” In the epil

The Arts Fuse • 5th July 2023

Book Review: "Chain-Gang All-Stars" -- A Terrifying Future World

In this novel Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah creates a terrifying future world. I’m glad that he chose to anchor that creation so powerfully in the shameful present.

is an ambitious novel by a determined author. Most novelists who want to address hideous social conditions imagine what might happen next and let the damaged characters and grim circumstances do the work. Adjei-Brenyah certainly does this. But via footnotes, he adds messages from history, contemporary and otherwise, to his tale of a worl

The Arts Fuse • 20th April 2023

Book Review: "You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You're Innocent" -- Believe It

This is a well-researched and accessible account of how and how often the system locks up the wrong people and keeps them locked up.

You Might Go To Prison, Even Though You’re Innocent by Justin Brooks. 222 pages, University of California Press.

If you’re Caucasian, rich, and reasonably well-connected, you probably WON’T go to prison, even though you’re innocent. Still, Justin Brooks, the Director of the California Innocence Project has a good point as well as a provocative title for this well

The Arts Fuse • 25th February 2023

Book Review: "What’s Prison For?" -- A Case for Building Trust and Mutual Respect

In this valuable and necessary book Bill Keller argues that American prisons need to accept that men and women don’t stop being human beings because they’re in the custody of the state.

What’s Prison For?: Punishment and Rehabilitation in the Age of Mass Incarceration) by Bill Keller. Columbia Global Reports, New York, 159 pages, $16.

One of Bill Keller’s informants characterizes what he terms “the cynical cycle of American justice” this way: “Sweep up young men, mostly from broken families in

The Arts Fuse • 6th December 2022

Book Review: "Barred: Why the Innocent Can't Get Out of Prison" -- Blind Justice

Daniel S. Medwed demonstrates just how astronomical the odds are against anyone who tries to question a guilty verdict, no matter how suspect the conviction.

Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison by Daniel S. Medwed. Basic Books, 321 pages.

Nearly all of Barred, Daniel S. Medwed’s exploration of the branch of the justice system responsible for providing people who’ve been unjustly incarcerated with the opportunity to seek relief, is profoundly discouraging.

Medwed, University Disti

Andover Alumni Magazine • 17th November 2022

Teaching behind bars

The competition for spots in these programs is fierce. That’s one thing the programs have in common. Another is that no bumper sticker could ever distill the importance of these programs or of the smart, supportive, and respectful students in them.

My experience with incarcerated students should have begun 30 years ago. That was when a colleague of mine at Curry College, where I taught in the English Department for almost 40 years, invited me to participate in the program he’d established for

The Arts Fuse • 15th November 2022

Book Review: "The Idea of Prison Abolition" -- An Unconvincing Case

The Idea of Prison Abolition is a worthwhile book, but Dr. Shelby’s case, philosophically strong as it might be, is not very likely to convince prison abolitionists.

The Arts Fuse • 27th October 2022

Book Review: "Manifesting Justice" -- Powerful Tools in the Struggle to Reform the American Justice System

“As the old saying goes,” writes author and former prosecutor Valena Beety, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

Part narrative, part prescription, Manifesting Justice examines the many ways in which the legal system fails, and presents approaches to addressing those failures.

Harvard Graduate School of Education • 12th June 2022

Rookie Lessons

When I signed on as a teaching assistant with the Emerson Prison Initiative in the fall of 2018, I had 48 years of teaching experience.

But when I walked through the series of locked doors and mechanical gates to get to the education building at the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Concord for the first time, I felt like a rookie.

Emerson Prison Initiative/New Politics • 18th August 2021

Learning From My Students

I was sympathetic to the circumstances of some people who are incarcerated even before I’d been inside a prison.

WBUR • 8th January 2021

How The WNBA Helped Democrats Regain Control Of The Senate

Like lots of victories, the wide, deep and heroic results of Tuesday’s election have lots of fathers... and mothers.

WBUR • 25th September 2020

Littlefield: A Rhyme About Sports During A Pandemic

I hope you won’t conclude from this that I am out of sorts.
And I am not complaining I no longer write of sports.
The times provide, as I have found, and so there is no dearth
Of more significant concerns here and around the earth.

23rd July 2020

I'm Sorry To Say It: This Should Be An American Summer Without Baseball

Would a diversion from the daily weight of the grim fact of the virus and the discouraging, shameful failure of the Trump administration to respond to the emergency be welcome?

Sure.

But sports? I don’t think so.

WBUR • 18th January 2019

I Told Stories For A Living. Now I Help Prisoners Tell Their Own

I decided to volunteer in the education program at a medium security prison, because, as a recent retiree, I had the time, and because I wanted to do something that might make me uncomfortable.