The House I live in: war on drugs

As America remains embroiled in conflict overseas, a less visible war is taking place at home, costing countless lives, destroying families, and inflicting untold damage on future generations of Americans. Over forty years, the War on Drugs has accounted for more than 45 million arrests, made America the world’s largest jailer, and damaged poor communities at home and abroad. Yet for all that, drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available today than ever before. Filmed in more than twenty states, The House I Live In captures heart-wrenching stories from individuals at all levels of America’s War on Drugs. From the dealer to the grieving mother, the narcotics officer to the senator, the inmate to the federal judge, the film offers a penetrating look inside America’s longest war, offering a definitive portrait and revealing its profound human rights implications.

While recognizing the seriousness of drug abuse as a matter of public health, the film investigates the tragic errors and shortcomings that have meant it is more often treated as a matter for law enforcement, creating a vast machine that feeds largely on America’s poor, and especially on minority communities. Beyond simple misguided policy, The House I Live In examines how political and economic corruption have fueled the war for forty years, despite persistent evidence of its moral, economic, and practical failures.

via http://www.thehouseilivein.org/see-the-film/about-the-film/

Brooklyn: social costs, crime, and the prison boom

Million Dollar Blocks: the neighborhood costs of America's prison boom (by Jennifer Gonnerman) in  Prison Profiteers.

Excerpt: In Brooklyn last year, there were 35 blocks that fit this category - ones where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million. In at least one case, the price tag will actually surpass $5 million. These blocks are largely concentrated in the poorest pockets of the borough's poorest neighborhoods, including East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville.
...New York's state prisons release around 28,000 people a year. Nearly two-thirds of them return to New York City. They arrive wearing state-issued clothes - a plain sweatshirt and stiff denim pants - and they come back to the same streets they left. They bring home all the memories and lessons of prison life, plus the system's parting gift, $40. Usually, they discover that the neighborhoods they left behind have not changed, and that life on the outside can be incredibly difficult. If the past is any predictor, half of them will be back upstate within three years. 

"70% of the children in this school live below the federal poverty line."
BROOKLYN CASTLE tells the stories of five members of the chess team at a below-the-poverty-line inner city junior high school that has won more national championships than any other in the country. The film follows the challenges these kids face in their personal lives as well as on the chessboard, and is as much about the sting of their losses as it is about the anticipation of their victories. Ironically, the biggest obstacle thrust upon them arises not from other competitors but from recessionary budget cuts to all the extracurricular activities at their school. BROOKLYN CASTLE shows how these kids’ dedication to chess magnifies their belief in what is possible for their lives. After all, if they can master the world’s most difficult game, what can’t they do?
via http://www.brooklyncastle.com/about/synopsis

Wise words from a reverend

Definition of a successful life:

To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived.

--Harry Emerson Fosdick

Cross-cultural studies in psychopathology

"People at a given moment in history in need of expressing their psychological suffering have a limited number of symptoms to choose from - a symptom pool."

"When someone unconsciously latches onto a behavior in the symptom pool, he or she is doing so for a very specific reason: the person is taking troubling emotions and internal conflicts that are often indistinct and frustratingly beyond expression and distilling them into a symptom or behavior that is a culturally recognized signal of suffering."

"Patients unconsciously endeavor to produce symptoms that will correspond to the medical diagnostics of the time."

Implications?
The patient is unconsciously striving for recognition and legitimization of internal distress. Naming of disease in an official, public way makes for a perilous event.

"A victim processes a traumatic event as a function of what it means. This meaning is drawn from their society and culture and this shapes how they seek help and their expectation of recovery."