Family & Children: All Articles and Books

Even Curious George Can Be Scary

Erin Drankoski — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:41:00 -0400

From the Editors: "Where the Wild Things Are," a film based on Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book, hit theaters on Friday. The book is loved by 4- and 5-year-olds, but this PG-rated movie may well be too scary for them.

Child development experts debate whether, when it comes to the big screen, live-action films are easier for preschoolers to identify with and enjoy than complex animation. But the live-action G-rated movie seems increasingly rare these days.

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'It’s Not on Obama. It’s Really Still on Us.'

Erin Drankoski — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:03:00 -0400

For eight television seasons (NBC, 1984-92), the Emmy Award-winning The Cosby Show, written by and starring comedian Bill Cosby, beamed an unflinching, yet humorous black family portrait into living rooms across America. Cosby, as Dr. Heathcliff Huxtable, presided over this historic foray into black upper-middle class life. The sitcom was a window into a certain, often enviable kind of black familial and romantic love, a showcase for amazing talent and a place where the situations or “problems” of a
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Kindergarten Need Not Be a Pressure Cooker

Erin Drankoski — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 05:48:00 -0400

A few years ago, Newsweek called kindergarten "the new first grade." This month, as I watch my 5-year-old settle into her classroom, it's clear the trend hasn't abated. In May, she was kneading Play-Doh in preschool. Now she has an assigned seat and "guided reading" lessons.
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Lunchtime Lessons from New Orleans

Erin Drankoski — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 08:31:00 -0400

President Obama's daughters get healthy school lunches. Why don't I? So asked a pigtailed black girl plastered on buses and billboards around Washington, D.C. The White House blasted the political ad, which promoted healthy food options in public schools, as exploitative -- but the little girl's complaint should resonate with an administration that has prioritized healthy eating and food security, from both the East and West Wing of the White House.
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Headed Toward Extinction

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 06:52:00 -0400

World population will hit 7 billion by 2012, according to a recent United Nations report. Given that we just hit the 6 billion mark in October 1999, it is easy to conclude that there are just too many people in the world. How are we ever going to overcome global warming, feed the masses, get that beachfront property, let alone find parking, if the population keeps jumping by nearly one billion per decade?
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Thank You, Sarah Palin

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:02:00 -0500

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Red Sex, Blue Sex

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:08:00 -0500

In early September, when Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced that her unwed seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristol, was pregnant, many liberals were shocked, not by the revelation but by the reaction to it. They expected the news to dismay the evangelical voters that John McCain was courting with his choice of Palin. Yet reports from the floor of the Republican Convention, in St. Paul, quoted dozens of delegates who seemed unfazed, or even buoyed, by the news. A delegate from Louisiana told CBS News, "Like so many other American families who are in the same situation, I think it's great that she instilled in her daughter the values to have the child and not to sneak off someplace and have an abortion." A Mississippi delegate claimed that "even though young children are making that decision to become pregnant, they've also decided to take responsibility for their actions and decided to follow up with that and get married and raise this child." Palin's family drama, delegates said, was similar to the experience of many socially conservative Christian families. As Marlys Popma, the head of evangelical outreach for the McCain campaign, told National Review, "There hasn't been one evangelical family that hasn't gone through some sort of situation." In fact, it was Popma's own "crisis pregnancy" that had brought her into the movement in the first place.

During the campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin's pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America's dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in "red states" generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't choose to have an abortion.

A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called "Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers," and he is working on a follow-up that includes a section titled "Red Sex, Blue Sex." His findings are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of some thirty-four hundred thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, and from a comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents--seventy-four per cent--say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would be an embarrassment.) But, according to Add Health data, evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their "sexual début"--to use the festive term of social-science researchers--shortly after turning sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex earlier.

Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus reports, is that evangelical Protestant teen-agers are significantly less likely than other groups to use contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the abstinence movement's warnings that condoms won't actually protect them from pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half of sexually active teen-agers who say that they seek guidance from God or the Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time. By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use protection.

The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they make their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light shows, or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with their fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry. More than half of those who take such pledges--which, unlike abstinence-only classes in public schools, are explicitly Christian--end up having sex before marriage, and not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers, and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these communities use condoms when they break the pledge.

Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools, if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it's hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it's Sodom and Gomorrah.

Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in behavior for one group of evangelical teen-agers: those who score highest on measures of religiosity--such as how often they go to church, or how often they pray at home. But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold socially conservative beliefs, aren't deeply observant.

Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how "embedded" a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible alternative to America's sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn't the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make a difference. Teen-agers who live with both biological parents are more likely to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.

A terrific 2005 documentary, "The Education of Shelby Knox," tells the story of a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas, who has taken a True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth pastor, and many of her neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for comprehensive sex education. At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only education, but, Knox says, "maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the hall pregnant." In the film, Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but less because she took a pledge than because she has a fearlessly independent mind and the kind of parents who--despite their own conservative leanings--admire her outspokenness. Devout Republicans, her parents end up driving her around town to make speeches that would have curled their hair before their daughter started making them. Her mother even comes to take pride in Shelby's efforts, because while abstinence pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don't acknowledge "reality."

Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a world of Internet porn, celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and they have the same hormonal urges that their peers have. Yet they come from families and communities in which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled until the first night of a transcendent honeymoon. Regnerus writes, "In such an atmosphere, attitudes about sex may formally remain unchanged (and restrictive) while sexual activity becomes increasingly common. This clash of cultures and norms is felt most poignantly in the so-called Bible Belt." Symbolic commitment to the institution of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating--hence the drive to outlaw gay marriage--but the actual practice of it is scattershot.

Among blue-state social liberals, commitment to the institution of marriage tends to be unspoken or discreet, but marriage in practice typically works pretty well. Two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of George Washington University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, are writing a book on the subject, and they argue that "red families" and "blue families" are "living different lives, with different moral imperatives." (They emphasize that the Republican-Democrat divide is less important than the higher concentration of "moral-values voters" in red states.) In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). "The ‘blue states' of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage," Cahn and Carbone observe. They also note that people start families earlier in red states--in part because they are more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by seeking an abortion.

Of all variables, the age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between red and blue families. The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce; women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.

There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to these rules--messily divorcing professional couples in Boston, high-school sweethearts who stay sweetly together in rural Idaho. Still, Cahn and Carbone conclude, "the paradigmatic red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their lives are stabilizing."

Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education. Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct "middle-class morality" taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not social conservatives. In Regnerus's survey, the teen-agers who espouse this new morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, "They are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks." These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of "strategic orientation"--how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making decisions. Because these teen-agers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not opposed in principle to sex before marriage--just careful about it. Accordingly, they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the idea of remaining "technical virgins" but because they assess it as a safer option. "Solidly middle- or upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable socioeconomic and educational expectations, courtesy of their parents and their communities' lifestyles," Regnerus writes. "They are happy with their direction, generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few moral qualms about expressing their nascent sexuality." They might have loved Ellen Page in "Juno," but in real life they'd see having a baby at the wrong time as a tragic derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says, unprotected sex has become "a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without a seatbelt. It's not just unwise anymore; it's wrong."

Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks--in the blue-state scheme, people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to the more affluent, for whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of educational opportunities and career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is clearly failing on its own terms--producing high rates of teen pregnancy, divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that social conservatives say they abhor. In "Forbidden Fruit," Regnerus offers an "unscientific postscript," in which he advises social conservatives that if they really want to maintain their commitment to chastity and to marriage, they'll need to do more to help young couples stay married longer. As the Reverend Rick Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper, "Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional marriage, when divorce has already broken it down." Conservatives may need to start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving oneself for marriage.

"Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex is unreasonable," Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that advocate chastity should "work more creatively to support younger marriages. This is not the 1950s (for which I am glad), where one could bank on social norms, extended (and larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and sustain early family formation."

Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory portrayals of sex that they offer to teen-agers. In the Shelby Knox documentary, a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as "what two dogs do out on the street corner--they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom boom." Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, "Every Young Woman's Battle," by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: "physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description." Neither is the most realistic or helpful view for a young person to take into marriage, as a few advocates of abstinence acknowledge. The savvy young Christian writer Lauren Winner, in her book "Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity," writes, "Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married." Teenagers and single adults are "told over and over not to have sex, but no one ever encourages" them "to be bodily or sensual in some appropriate way"--getting to know and appreciate what their bodies can do through sports, especially for girls, or even thinking sensually about something like food. Winner goes on, "This doesn't mean, of course, that if only the church sponsored more softball leagues, everyone would stay on the chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean that the church ought to cultivate ways of teaching Christians to live in their bodies well--so that unmarried folks can still be bodily people, even though they're not having sex, and so that married people can give themselves to sex freely."

Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at teen-agers forbids all forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. "Every Young Woman's Battle," for example, tells teen-agers that "the momentary relief" of "self-gratification" can lead to "shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what others might think or that something is wrong with you." And it won't slake sexual desire: "Once you begin feeding baby monsters, their appetites grow bigger and they want MORE! It's better not to feed such a monster in the first place."

Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex education earlier this year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it's possible to "believe in abstinence in a religious sense," but still understand that abstinence-only education is dangerous "for students who simply are not abstaining." As Knox's approach makes clear, you don't need to break out the sex toys to teach sex ed--you can encourage teen-agers to postpone sex for all kinds of practical, emotional, and moral reasons. A new "abstinence-plus" curriculum, now growing in popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway. "Abstinence works," Knox said at the hearing. "Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not."

It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a "secondary" or "born-again" virgin. That's not an idea, surely, that helps teen-agers postpone sex or have it responsibly.

The "pro-family" efforts of social conservatives--the campaigns against gay marriage and abortion--do nothing to instill the emotional discipline or the psychological smarts that forsaking all others often involves. Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality--indeed, they may feel that it's unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren't originally about values--maybe they were about maximizing education and careers--yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment, regardless of their parents' economic circumstances. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it's pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they're not yet ready. For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn't true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.

Some evangelical Christians are starting to reckon with the failings of the preaching-and-pledging approach. In "The Education of Shelby Knox," for example, Shelby's father is uncomfortable, at first, with his daughter's campaign. Lubbock, after all, is a town so conservative that its local youth pastor tells Shelby, "You ask me sometimes why I look at you a little funny. It's because I hear you speak and I hear tolerance." But as her father listens to her arguments he realizes that the no-tolerance ethic simply hasn't worked in their deeply Christian community. Too many girls in town are having sex, and having babies that they can't support. As Shelby's father declares toward the end of the film, teen-age pregnancy "is a problem--a major, major problem that everybody's just shoving under the rug."

Prisoner of the Heart

adminn — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 07:53:00 -0400

Twenty-one years ago, Daisy Benson brought a gun to an argument. She says she didn’t mean to shoot, and that may be true, but you bring a gun to an argument, a lot can go wrong. Daisy was convicted of murder, given 15 to life, and sent away to prison, hundreds of miles from home, a small, poor town in Northern California. Seven years later, her family saved up enough to visit. That’s when her daughter Robbin -- at the time, she was in her 20s -- hatched a plan that sounded so crazy, when Daisy first told me about it, I thought, this can't be true. But then I tracked Robbin down. And they both remember it starting exactly the same way...

Listen to the radio segment using the player above, or download it as an MP3 file at the bottom of this page.

Grand New Party

Ron Tang — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:18:00 -0400

* This article was excerpted from "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam.

The Old Consensus

When Barry Goldwater lost the 1964 presidential election by 16 million votes, carrying only six states and faring worse than any major-party candidate since Alf Landon in 1936, nobody seriously entertained the possibility that conservatism would rise from his defeat, let alone that the race might mark the beginning of a decades-long realignment in American politics. The Goldwater debacle was greeted instead as a welcome affirmation of a political and cultural order that had endured since the New Deal thirty years before. There had been intimations, in the early 1960s, that this consensus might be headed for a precipice, and so its custodians greeted the election results with head-nodding, hosannas, and more than a little relief. Like a man whose tumor has proven benign, they insisted vehemently that they had never doubted the happy outcome for a moment. Everywhere in autumn 1964 there were panegyrics to the center, to consensus, to the conventional wisdom -- all of which conservatives had dared to challenge, and all of which had risen, as every pundit had always known they would, to cast Goldwater down to a devastating defeat.

This old and fated consensus called itself "liberal," and indeed it was, in the sense that Americans of the 1950s looked to government as the source of wealth and progress more than in any era before or since. They had every reason to -- thanks to World War II and the Cold War, the federal government almost doubled in size between 1940 and 1960, and American prosperity rose with it. The critics of Franklin Delano Roosevelt fell silent, the long Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower accepted the innovations of his Democratic predecessors, and New Deal liberalism gave way to Cold War liberalism without skipping a beat or forfeiting its claim on the nation's loyalties. The American Right still threw up the occasional demagogue -- a Douglas MacArthur, a Joseph McCarthy -- and put liberals on the defensive, but neither the liberal coalition in politics nor the liberal dominance of the world of ideas seemed to face any serious challenge.

Yet the consensus of the 1950s was deeply conservative as well. It had been built by liberals, using liberal means, but it employed government power to preserve, rather than renovate, the most distinctive habits and institutions of American life. It wasn't just that the New Deal, for all its socialist tendencies, ultimately preserved free-market capitalism at a moment when many intellectuals were ready to abandon it. It was that the Roosevelt majority helped save the ideal of a self-sufficient working class, which had been central to American life from the beginning. And it did so by mixing economic liberalism with social conservatism, a potent political combination that raised America's working class, our democracy's natural political majority, to heights of security and self-confidence unseen before and since.

The Ownership Society

The interests of the working class -- the common man, the hardworking but unexceptional citizen -- have been at the heart of every great American political movement. From Jefferson to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan, our most successful leaders have sought the democratization of wealth, competence, and social standing -- not so that every American might be rich or famous, but so that we might all be independent and self-reliant and secure. In this sense, the American dream is ultimately a dream of home, of a place to call your own, earned and not inherited, and free from the petty tyrannies of landlords, bureaucrats, and bankers. It's a dream of a country in which ownership is available to everyone, provided that they are willing to work for it, rather than being handed out on the basis of wealth or caste, brains or beauty.

Both our political choices and our cultural habits have made the dream a reality. In the early republic, when land was the vehicle for ownership and independence, the federal government added nearly 2 million square miles to the original United States; it pursued policies, from the ordinances of the 1780s onward, to ensure that ownership would be as widely distributed as possible; and it invested in massive "internal improvements," from highways and canals to the transcontinental railroad, to make the settlement of the American interior possible. The same period that saw the violent rooting-out of the greatest internal challenge to America's ownership society -- the slave economy of the South -- also saw the passage of the Homestead Act, by Republicans who were nearly as exercised by "wage slavery" as they were by the real thing. The act was the defining government policy of America's agrarian era, in a sense -- an attempt to preserve the openness and mobility of a society built around yeoman farmers and to prevent the emergence of a hidebound, class-ridden society built on the backs of industrial laborers.

The contrast with how Europe's governments treated the working class during the same period is instructive. Both continents extended the franchise, but Europe's nations did so out of fear: As British prime minister Earl Grey put it with admirable honesty in 1831, "The Principle of my reform is to prevent the necessity of revolution" -- the non-metaphorical kind of revolution in which elites get their heads chopped off. America, on the other hand, did so out of hope -- the hope of attracting settlers, as states competed to offer the most expansive definition of political freedom, the better to lure enterprising pioneers. Similarly, Bismarck's Germany adopted the most ambitious program of social insurance in the world, the better to keep the factories running smoothly, but German elites were far less inclined to expand access to education. The goal was to create a docile working class, not an educated and ambitious one. America, in contrast, expanded schooling first and adopted social insurance programs only in the twentieth century. In each case, America's leaders wanted self-sufficiency and independence; Europe's wanted conformity and obedience.

But all the government interventions in the world wouldn't have succeeded without America's distinctive cultural habits. Politics provided the framework in which Americans pursued the dream of home, but culture provided the sense of solidarity and the moral guardrails necessary to sustain a society where the common man is independent of both state power and the dubious protections of noblesse oblige. The great danger of modern life is atomization and isolation, a danger that has prompted countless moderns to seek to impose order on their societies from above, either through totalizing ideologies -- fascism and communism and all their variations; Salafist Islam -- or the swaddling clothes of a nanny state. But America has avoided these temptations, relying instead on a powerful network of mediating institutions -- churches and voluntary associations, marriage and family life -- and an intense sense of national solidarity to provide a somewhat mysterious order from below.

"The central conservative truth," Daniel Moynihan famously remarked, "is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society." Being a liberal himself, he added that the "central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." But the central American truth is that there's no way to cleanly separate politics from culture, or to separate either one from economics. Private virtue and cultural solidarity create economic security and independence; economic security enables people to persist in virtue; and wise public policy promotes both virtue and security at once. The reverse is also true -- cultural dysfunction breeds economic dislocation and vice versa, while governmental folly can shape both culture and economics for the worse. And it has been the great achievement of American life that we have maintained, through many controversies, a healthy cycle rather than a widening gyre.

The Maternalist Moment

In the early years of the twentieth century, though, this achievement seemed in danger. The frontier had finally closed, and industrialization and urbanization appeared to pose nearly as great a threat as slavery to widespread ownership and equality-in-independence. The slave economy was regional and probably fated for extinction even without the Civil War; the industrial economy was national and insatiable. The laborer in the factory could never be as secure in his own home as the farmer with his own plot of land: The farmer controlled the means of production; the worker controlled only a piece of the assembly line. At its worst, industrialization seemed to betoken either a new era of wage-slave feudalism, or if you believed the Marxists, an end to the democratic dream and a merciless war of class against class.

America's reformers pursued a variety of responses to this crisis, all of them aimed at ensuring that labor replaced land as a vehicle for ownership and independence. High tariffs on imported goods protected American manufacturers, and in theory provided them with the profit margins they needed to raise wages above subsistence level; immigration restrictions protected American labor from competition with foreign-born workers. Trusts were busted to break up cartels and keep the free market running smoothly, and labor laws instituted workplace protections and established an eight-hour day, effectively manufacturing scarcity to ensure that hourly wages went up. And unions gained ground, slowly but steadily, creating an economic climate in which the common man could bargain with the rich and claim his fair share of prosperity.

But one of the most important responses, and one of the least remembered, was the attempt to shore up family life, which seemed to be breaking down under the pressures of the new economy. The massive shift from the countryside to the cities, and the concurrent shift from large, extended families rooted in rural communities to small, unstable families dependent on wage work, wrested all but the wealthiest and most secure Americans from traditional sources of moral and economic support. Marriage rates fell, divorce rates rose, and crime climbed steadily between 1900 and the 1920s. Even though America was wealthier than Europe on a per capita basis, the infant mortality rate was twice as high in affluent America as it was across the Atlantic, and the rate of maternal deaths in childbirth was appallingly high. Some suspected that these shocking statistics could be attributed to immigration, but as the pioneering medical researcher Josephine Baker found in 1922, rates of infant mortality were in fact highest among the children of native-born American mothers.

For a small clique of highly educated women, which included pioneers in the social sciences and social work, these dispiriting numbers needed to be counted against all the technological marvels and therapeutic advances made possible by industrialization. These women, later dubbed the "maternalists," saw the slow, steady disintegration of the American family under radically new economic conditions as the central challenge of their time. They condemned Big Business's efforts to efface and undermine the value of domestic work as the entering wedge of a broader campaign to reduce self-reliant citizens to mere consumers and clients. In the words of Allan Carlson, the best recent historian of their movement, the maternalists "defined the family as the true crucible of Americanism, and held up the mother['s role]... as their economic and political program for renewal."

These arguments stood in opposition to the prevailing spirit of the age. The outsourcing of functions that had once belonged exclusively to the household was the source, after all, of America's industrial success. It seemed perfectly natural that this logic should extend from the manufacture of durable goods to the intimate sphere. As William Ogburn, a family scholar at the University of Chicago and an adviser to Herbert Hoover, memorably put it, the "barriers of custom" that kept women in the home simply meant that the "community is not making the most of this potential supply of able services." That was certainly the conclusion of the industrial barons who depended on the nimble hands of young mothers. The public schools, in the words of critic Florence Kelley, increasingly aimed "to prepare girls to become at the earliest moment cash children and machine tenders." At the same time, the National Association of Manufacturers joined with equity feminist groups like the National Women's Party in opposing legislation that would offer any special treatment to women in the workforce. And all of these forces coalesced around the then-dominant Republican Party, whose technocratic, pro-industry confidence would reach its peak in the Hoover years.

Against these trends, the maternalist thinkers -- Jane Addams, Josephine Baker, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, and Frances Kellor, among several others -- devised a highly original ideological synthesis to address the threat that industrialization posed to the working class. Addams's famous Hull House defended the interests of women and children by attacking poverty's roots in social atomization, and the network of Settlement Houses that imitated Hull House's success were incubators for policy innovation on a national scale. Their founders pushed for child labor laws, for public schools that taught homemaking as well as bookkeeping, for campaigns to reduce infant and maternal mortality, and for symbolic statements like the establishment of Mother's Day. They tugged at the heartstrings of American voters, framing their cause as a simple matter of "baby-saving." As Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement, put it, "If the government can have a department to take such an interest in the cotton crop, why can't it have a bureau to look after the nation's child crop?"

By 1912, the federal government had established the U.S. Children's Bureau to do exactly that. Led by Lathrop, the Children's Bureau agitated from within the government for sweeping reforms designed to reduce infant mortality. Its greatest success was the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which funded state-level programs in maternal and infant hygiene and a nationwide network of nurses and prenatal clinics. Like many of the New Deal programs it anticipated, the program was formally universal yet designed in such a way that working-class women reaped most of the benefits. Opposition from the American Medical Association eventually scuttled the act (then as now, the medical establishment seemed to fear the effects of democratizing access to medical knowledge), but only after thousands of maternity clinics were built across the nation and the nation's infant mortality rate had fallen dramatically.

Even more significant than the act itself, though, was the argument that Lathrop made on its behalf. Responding to critics who saw the legislation as somehow authoritarian or socialistic, she noted that the legislation sought "not to get the Government to do things for the family" but rather "to create a family that can do things for itself." With those words, Lathrop expressed a worldview that went on to inform, and sometimes even define, the New Deal.

The New 'I Do'

Ron Tang — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 05:15:00 -0400

Hold the champagne.

Or at least the California sparkling wine.

This week should be a joyous one for those of us who believe in the right to marry the person you love. A month after the California Supreme Court overturned the state's ban on same-sex marriage, gay couples will be able to walk into county offices here and secure the same marriage license to which heterosexual couples such as my wife and I are entitled.

Partners are hastily arranging nuptials, and the wedding-industrial complex of caterers and consultants is anticipating a summer windfall. In San Francisco, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, who are both in their 80s and have been together for more than five decades, have arranged to be married by Mayor Gavin Newsom minutes after the ban is officially lifted at 5 p.m. tomorrow. "It means a great deal that we can get a license like anyone else," Lyon recently told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Gay rights supporters should toast the happy couples, but they might want to wait before raising a glass to the state. The ruling will hardly change California, a place blissfully devoted to its live-and-let-live ethos. But California -- with its dysfunctional politics and government -- may hurt the cause of same-sex marriage.

It's far from clear that California's institutions -- the courts, legislature, governor or ballot process -- possess the credibility or power to bring a lasting resolution to any public debate, especially one as contentious as same-sex marriage. Yes, gay marriage supporters are likely to claim more victories than defeats at all levels of California government. But victories in specific lawsuits or bills don't guarantee the unambiguous legalization of same-sex marriage here. The state's madcap legal and political systems offer too many ways to frustrate or delay a final decision. For gay couples and their supporters, California could become an expensive, time-consuming quagmire -- gay marriage's Vietnam.

How can this be, you ask, after the justices' ringing endorsement of gay marriage rights?

Because California has a powerful ballot-initiative process -- the one that in 2000 allowed voters to outlaw gay marriage in the first place -- and the state Supreme Court doesn't always get the final word. Consider the ballot initiative that Californians will vote on this fall. Sponsored by gay marriage opponents, the measure would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman and put this wording into the state constitution, thus reversing the Supreme Court's ruling.

Or not.

"If people vote yes [on the ban]," said Steve Smith, a political consultant working to defeat the initiative, "I think you're going to have immediate litigation." Lawyers on both sides speculate about all kinds of lawsuits, from technical attacks on the initiative's language to broad federal claims about the nature of republican government. Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, suggests that even if voters do approve the ban, a court could grant a stay on its enforcement. "That would allow marriages to continue to take place," he said, until judges sort out the initiative's constitutionality -- a process that could take years.

Confusing? Sure. But that's California.

If, on the other hand, the initiative fails, gay marriage opponents wouldn't surrender either. "Would that be the end of the road? Obviously not," said Glen Lavy, a senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, which has provided much of the legal firepower behind the movement to ban same-sex marriage. "This is a fundamental institution of society."

Gay marriage opponents would launch various legal challenges, most on religious grounds. Any institution with a sacred affiliation and a public service mission -- religious schools, health facilities, charities, even summer camps -- could argue that being forced to recognize the marriages of same-sex couples who walk through its doors is a violation of religious freedom. According to Brad Sears, executive director of the Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at UCLA's law school, there could be thousands of such claims.

Even if these legal efforts go nowhere, the political battle will continue. If the ballot initiative is defeated in November, nothing prevents its backers from drawing up another one, to come before voters in 2010, the time of the next regularly scheduled statewide election -- or even earlier if the state holds a special election. "This is one of the problems with the initiative process," said Pamela S. Karlan, a scholar at Stanford Law School. "There isn't any way of saying, 'The voters have spoken, and it's over.' They can be asked to speak on it again and again and again."

Why can't the other branches of California government put a stop to this?

The legislature and the governor could try, but their power is limited, and their record on same-sex marriage doesn't inspire confidence. For at least four years, the Democratic-controlled state legislature has supported marriage rights for gays but has proven too ham-handed to overcome the ban voters enacted in 2000.

In California -- wouldn't you know -- only the voters can change statutes enacted by ballot initiative. The legislature ignored this inconvenient fact, and on more than one occasion passed bills that were almost certainly unconstitutional. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a very California-style Republican, vetoed those bills, probably saving gay marriage supporters from potentially disastrous court rulings. California lawmakers, an irresponsible species, were hardly grateful, criticizing the governor for his actions.

But frankly, Schwarzenegger hasn't shown much leadership. He has been trying to have it both ways on the issue. Asked about the subject during his 2003 campaign, he delivered an all-time great malapropism: "I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman." At a state Republican convention in 2004, he blasted Newsom, who had married gay couples in San Francisco even though it was against state law. Less than two weeks later, he told Jay Leno that he would have no problem if such marriages were legalized.

Recently, Schwarzenegger has said that he believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman but that he doesn't want to impose his views on Californians. And he opposes the current initiative, aligning himself with same-sex marriage supporters. But no one should count on the Terminator traveling through time to save gay marriage. Schwarzenegger often sounds like a man who just wishes that the issue would go away.

So why do supporters need the governor and the legislature, if the state Supreme Court has already made its ruling?

Because the court's decision is so broad that it raises new political and legal questions that will have to be taken up by the other branches of government. For the first time, the court ruled that gay people are a "suspect classification" -- a group, such as women or African Americans, who face discrimination because of immutable characteristics -- and that any law governing sexual orientation requires "strict scrutiny." In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Ronald M. George cited a new right that appears nowhere in the text of the state constitution: "the right of an individual and a couple to have their own official family relationship accorded respect and dignity equal to that accorded the family relationship of other couples."

In a footnote, George added that such a right doesn't apply to polygamous or incestuous relationships. Good to know. But the court may have opened the door for "other, less deserving, claims of a right to marry," as Justice Marvin R. Baxter noted in a response to the majority opinion. (Please, nobody call the Mansons.)

Even if novel claims to marriage based on the same-sex marriage decision die in the courts, gay marriage opponents could use them as political fodder. And that's hardly the only political problem that might arise. In three separate sections of its 121 pages, the decision raises the possibility that, to achieve equality for same-sex couples, the state might eliminate the term "marriage" altogether. The decision doesn't endorse such a remedy, but it doesn't rule it out, either.

The elimination of "marriage" is unlikely, even in California. But at least some people here seem to think that no marriages are better than same-sex marriages. Clerks in two California counties have announced that they'll stop performing wedding ceremonies this week for any couples, gay or straight. (They'll still have to hand out licenses.) Just imagine the backlash if the push to recognize same-sex couples turned marriage into a merely religious rite (and right).

These tangles will seem academic to gay couples, who have waited years for simple freedoms. It shouldn't matter that California politics and controversial social policy make for, well, a rocky marriage. But it is a strategic problem. And gay rights advocates would be wise to remember that, with all the political and legal risks involved, the practical advantages of legalizing same-sex marriage in California are underwhelming.

Gay couples who upgrade their status from domestic partners to married spouses will win only a handful of new benefits, and many aren't worth all that much. In California, married couples may live apart, while domestic partners have to reside in the same home. Married couples also have a little-known right to "confidential marriage," meaning that the marriage certificate and the date of the marriage aren't part of the public record. (The reasons for this provision are another California story altogether.) Domestic partnerships, on the other hand, are public. When it comes to divorce, though, married spouses are actually at a disadvantage -- they must have a legal residence in the state and must seek a court judgment; divorcing domestic partners don't need either.

Gay couples who get married this week will gain these new rights and responsibilities, but they still won't have all the same freedoms as heterosexual married couples in California. That's because federal law provides legal recognition only to marriages between a man and a woman. So when it comes to spousal benefits related to federal income taxes, Social Security, federal housing, food stamps and military and veterans' programs, same-sex married couples remain unmarried in Uncle Sam's eyes.

If there's ever going to be true marriage equality in California, the fight that counts most won't take place in Sacramento. For that fight, the battleground is Washington.

The Lost Children

Ron Tang — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0500

In the summer of 1995, an Iranian man named Majid Yourdkhani allowed a friend to photocopy pages from “The Satanic Verses,” the Salman Rushdie novel, at the small print shop that he owned in Tehran. Government agents arrested the friend and came looking for Majid, who secretly crossed the border to Turkey and then flew to Canada. In his haste, Majid was forced to leave behind his wife, Masomeh; for months afterward, Iranian government agents phoned her and said things like “If you aren’t divorcing him, then you are supporting him, and we will therefore arrest you and torture you.” That October, Masomeh also escaped from Iran and joined Majid in Toronto, where they lived for ten years. Majid worked in a pizza place, Masomeh in a coffee shop. She dressed and acted the way she liked -- she is blond and pretty and partial to bright clothes and makeup, which she could never wear in public in Iran -- and for a long time the Yourdkhanis felt they were safe from politics and the past. Their son, Kevin, was born in Toronto, in 1997, a Canadian citizen. He grew into a happy, affectionate kid, tall and sturdy with a shock of dark hair. He liked math and social studies, developed asthma but dealt with it, and shared with his mom a taste for goofy comedies, such as the “Mr. Bean” movies. In December, 2005, however, the Yourdkhanis learned that the Canadian government had denied their application for political asylum, and Majid, Masomeh, and Kevin were deported to Iran.

Upon their return, the Yourdkhanis say, Masomeh was imprisoned for a month, and Majid for six, and during that time he was beaten and tortured. After Majid was released, the family paid a smuggler twenty thousand dollars to procure false documents and arrange a series of flights that would return them to Canada.

Then, on the last leg of the journey, the family ran into someone else’s bad luck. On February 4, 2007, during a flight from Georgetown, Guyana, to Toronto, a passenger had a heart attack and died, and the plane was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico. American immigration officials there ascertained that the Yourdkhanis’ travel documents were fake. The Yourdkhanis begged to be allowed to continue on to Canada, but they were told that if they wanted asylum they would have to apply for it in the United States. They did so, and, five days later, became part of one of the more peculiar, and contested, recent experiments in American immigration policy. They were locked inside a former medium-security prison in a desolate patch of rural Texas: the T. Don Hutto Residential Center.

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Hutto is one of two immigrant-detention facilities in America that house families -- the other is in Berks County, Pennsylvania -- and is the only one owned and run by a private prison company. The detention of immigrants is the fastest-growing form of incarceration in this country, and, with the support of the Bush Administration, it is becoming a lucrative business. At the end of 2006, some fourteen thousand people were in government custody for immigration-law violations, in a patchwork of detention arrangements, including space rented out by hundreds of local and state jails, and seven freestanding facilities run by private contractors. This number was up by seventy-nine per cent from the previous year, an increase that can be attributed, in large part, to the actions of Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division. In 2005, Chertoff announced the end of “catch-and-release” -- the long-standing practice of allowing immigrants caught without legal documents to remain free inside the country while they waited for an appearance in court. Since these illegal immigrants weren’t monitored in any way, the rate of no-shows was predictably high, and the practice inflamed anti-immigrant sentiment.

Private companies began making inroads into the detention business in the nineteen-eighties, when the idea was in vogue that almost any private operation was inherently more efficient than a government one. The largest firm, Corrections Corporation of America, or C.C.A., was founded in 1983. But poor management and a series of well-publicized troubles -- including riots at and escapes from prisons run by C.C.A. -- dampened the initial excitement. In the nineties, C.C.A.’s bid to take over the entire prison system of Tennessee, where the company is based, failed; state legislators had grown skeptical. By the end of 2000, C.C.A.’s stock had hit an all-time low. When immigration detention started its precipitate climb following 9/11, private prison companies eagerly offered their empty beds, and the industry was revitalized.

One complication was that hundreds of children were among the immigrant detainees. Typically, kids had been sent to shelters, which allowed them to attend school, while parents were held at closed facilities. Nobody thought that it was good policy to separate parents from children -- not immigration officials, not immigrant advocates, not Congress. In 2005, a report by the House Appropriations Committee expressed concern about “reports that children apprehended by D.H.S.” -- the Department of Homeland Security -- “even as young as nursing infants, are being separated from their parents and placed in shelters.” The committee also declared that children should not be placed in government custody unless their welfare was in question, and added that the Department of Homeland Security should “release families or use alternatives to detention” whenever possible. The report recommended a new alternative to detention known as the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program -- which allows people awaiting disposition of their immigration cases to be released into the community, provided that they are closely tracked by means such as electronic monitoring bracelets, curfews, and regular contact with a caseworker. The government has since established pilot programs in twelve cities, and reports that more than ninety per cent of the people enrolled in them show up for their court dates. The immigration agency could have made a priority of putting families, especially asylum seekers, into such programs. Instead, it chose to house families in Hutto, which is owned and run by C.C.A. Families would be kept together, but it would mean they were incarcerated together.

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When the Yourdkhanis were sent to Hutto last winter, the facility had been open for nine months, but few Americans knew of its existence. Hutto is in Taylor, Texas, a town of seventeen thousand, forty miles northeast of Austin, with a lot of boarded-up businesses on its main streets. A National Guard recruiting station is on the eastern side of town; a place that offers concealed-weapons training is at the opposite end. Hutto has more than five hundred beds, though the population fluctuates, and the facility appears never to have been at full capacity; about half the detainees are children. At the time the Yourdkhanis got there, many of the four hundred or so detainees were from Latin-American countries (these did not include Mexico, because Mexicans caught without documents are automatically sent home), and some of those were people who had come to the United States for economic reasons; that is, they were the kind of undocumented immigrants that most people probably think of when they hear of immigrants being rounded up somewhere in Texas. But a substantial number of the families were asylum seekers -- people from Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Romania. Like the Yourdkhanis, they were people who said that they had been persecuted in their home countries, and many of them had passed the first test for achieving asylum in the United States -- a so-called “credible fear” interview. None had criminal records.

The Yourdkhanis, upon arriving at Hutto, saw a white concrete complex with slit-shaped windows, surrounded by double fencing topped by rolls of razor wire. A shadeless exercise yard was ringed by floodlights. Across the street was a railroad track where freight trains frequently idled, cutting off the facility from the rest of Taylor. Families were placed in former inmate cells. Each cell had a twin bed or a bunk bed with a thin mattress, a small metal or porcelain sink, and an exposed toilet. Generally, mothers and very young children stayed together in one cell, fathers in a separate cell, and older children in another. Husbands and wives were not allowed to visit each other’s cells. Masomeh told me, “For three days, Majid had a fever, and I wasn’t allowed to go in and ask, ‘How are you?’ ” The cell doors were metal, and each had a window two inches wide; the floor and walls were bare, except for a shatterproof acrylic mirror. Doors were to remain open during the day, but they were wired with laser-detection alarms that were triggered when anyone came or went at night. A 2007 report by two advocacy groups -- the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children -- noted that if a child sleeping in a separate cell woke up at night and went looking for his parents the alarm would sound, and only C.C.A. staff members were allowed to respond.

The guards at Hutto conducted as many as seven head counts a day, during which all detainees, even toddlers, were supposed to remain in place, usually by their beds, for as long as it took to complete the count. In practice, this meant that detainees might be in their cells twelve hours a day. (When head counts were not taking place, detainees could assemble in the common area within their “pod” of cells, where there were couches and two televisions.) Last March, an immigration lawyer named Griselda Ponce testified before the U.S. District Court in Austin about conditions at Hutto, and told of an occasion when the five- or six-year-old daughter of a woman she was interviewing had to go to the rest room. The captain on duty told the girl that she could not do so during a head count. Ponce said that the girl made “six or seven requests,” and was rebuffed each time; after about fifteen minutes, the girl “smelled of urine.”

No contact visits were allowed at Hutto -- relatives had to sit behind Plexiglas partitions and talk through phones in the old prison visiting room. In any case, few relatives visited, since Hutto was so far from where most of them lived. Deka Warsame, a Somali woman, was detained at Hutto for four months, along with her three children. Her mother and a sister lived in Columbus, Ohio, but she told her lawyer that, even if her family could have come to Texas, she would have been ashamed to have them see her looking like a criminal, “trapped behind Plexiglas.” If detainees had an attorney, as Warsame did, the attorney could talk to them without a partition. During such conferences, children were required to stay by their parents’ side. The governing idea of Hutto was that detainees would constantly supervise their children -- as a result, it wasn’t deemed a child-care facility, and required no relevant licensing. But this also meant that children had to be in the same room even when, say, their parents recounted stories of torture, rape, or domestic abuse. Barbara Hines, a law professor who runs an immigration clinic at the University of Texas, in Austin, and who was one of the first legal representatives to see detainees at Hutto, began bringing crayons and markers with her, hoping to distract the kids.

Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs. In November, 2006, Krista Gregory, who lives in Austin and works with church groups there, got a call from a couple of Hutto employees who, she says, were unhappy about the lack of supplies for child detainees. Gregory arranged for local churches to donate toys, baby blankets, and Bibles.

Staff members, who wore police-type uniforms, were mostly people who had backgrounds in corrections rather than in child welfare. Detainees said that when parents or children broke rules guards threatened them with separation from their children. Kevin Yourdkhani, at the prompting of one of Hines’s law students, wrote a brief description of one such occasion. “I was in my bed and my dad came to fix my bed,” he wrote. “When the police came and saw my dad in the room, he said, ‘If He comes and see my dad again in my room His going to put my mom in a siprate jail and my dad in a sipate jail and me a foster kid.’ I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy. I went to sleep. I felt if I will be siprated I can never see my parents again, and I will get stepparents and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me.”

Michelle Brané, an advocate with the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, managed to get a tour of Hutto in December, 2006. Describing the facility as “an incredibly punitive-feeling place,” she said, “People there told us that children were being punished for normal kid stuff -- running around, making noise, tantrums. I have a two- and four-year-old at home, and I kept thinking, 'How would I manage in here keeping them under control?' The shocking thing is that the people running it didn’t realize any of that. I think they thought it was a great place.”

Majid Yourdkhani told me that he and his wife felt as though they had “disappeared into a black hole. We’d ask the officers, ‘What’s our future here? What’s going to happen to us? What do we need to do?’ We’d ask, and nobody could tell us.” That feeling of having disappeared wasn’t entirely irrational. Getting information about Hutto -- especially from the people who run it -- is hard. Private prison companies are not subject to the same legal requirements as public prisons to provide incident reports on assaults, escapes, deaths, or rapes. It’s true that a company’s contract stipulates that it must report such incidents to the government agency for which it is a vender, and people seeking information about what goes on inside a private prison can submit a Freedom of Information Act request to the government agency. But this can be an exercise in frustration, as Judith Greene, a researcher who is a critic of private prisons, found out. Several years ago, she and a colleague, Joshua Miller, were doing research on a new prison in California City, California, that was to be operated by C.C.A. for the federal Bureau of Prisons. According to Greene, before awarding the contract the bureau had signalled that the government would not delegate to a private company the legal authority to use force against inmates. Greene and Miller wondered how this would work in practice. In a Freedom of Information Act request, Greene asked for documents that might shed light on this question. Eventually, she recalls, she heard from the Bureau of Prisons that it was prepared to give her the information but had to get permission from C.C.A.; a second letter informed her that C.C.A. had said no, claiming that the information she sought about the use of force was a business secret. Greene told me, “Prisons in general are to a great extent secretive, isolated places, but if you’re dealing with private prisons you’ve got an additional layer to penetrate in order to find out essential facts and figures. And government agencies seem to give a lot of the decision-making to the private companies when it comes to what to reveal.” A bill now pending in Congress would, for the first time, make private prisons as accountable about their daily operations as public ones.

It’s easier to gain access to the death-row section of most publicly run prisons than it is to get into Hutto, unless you are a detainee or an employee of C.C.A. Even Jorge Bustamante, a sociologist and a former Nobel Peace Prize nominee, who is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights of Migrants, was denied access to Hutto. From Geneva, he had applied to visit, as part of a tour that he was making of immigration-detention facilities in the U.S, and permission was granted. But when he arrived in America, last May, Bustamante was told that permission had been revoked. Bustamante remains angry about the incident, and says he will mention it in a report that he plans to submit to the General Assembly this month. For my part, I got no response to repeated requests to tour the facility, which were sent by phone and fax to Evelyn Hernandez, the administrator of Hutto. (She also refused multiple requests to speak on the phone, as did top officials at C.C.A.) Two weeks after I submitted questions in writing to C.C.A. officials, I did receive some answers. Steven Owen, a spokesman for the corporation, wrote that “C.C.A. always strives to provide humane, safe and secure housing to the populations entrusted to our care in accordance with applicable laws and the expectations of our customers. We are proud of the company’s 25-year track record.” No reporters have been admitted on any occasion since a single-day group media tour, in February, 2007. Currently, the only way to see the inside of Hutto is to watch an intermittently blurry video available on YouTube, evidently filmed by immigration officials and later posted by a blogger. It shows kids and adults in blue and green scrubs walking down fluorescent-lit halls and eating food from plastic trays. There are brief shots of a prison cell outfitted with a crib and of a man lying on a couch, his wrist encircled by a bright-blue I.D. bracelet. Another sequence shows kids outside their cells, learning the alphabet song. The footage has no sound.

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Last March, the A.C.L.U., along with the immigration-law clinic at the University of Texas and the law firm LeBouef, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, brought suit against Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and the immigration officials who oversee Hutto. The suit said that conditions at Hutto violated a 1997 legal settlement that grew out of a Supreme Court case known as Flores v. Reno, which centered on the detention of minors who had arrived in the U.S. unaccompanied by an adult. The settlement called for minors in immigration custody to be released to family members or appointed custodians whenever possible, and ordered that children in detention be placed in the “least restrictive” setting available. Kevin Yourdkhani was among the twenty-six children named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. case. In a statement for the U.S. District Court in Austin, his mother said of conditions at Hutto, “Majid and I cannot be good parents. We cannot provide Kevin with the basic things that he needs... We cannot give him a pen to write with or any books to read. We cannot teach him about the outside world or let him run around, the way young boys should. We are totally helpless as parents and depend on the guards for everything.” Her family, she said, “is falling apart in here.”

The A.C.L.U. commissioned a psychiatrist to investigate conditions at Hutto, and, not surprisingly, the resulting report documented depression and fearfulness among children housed there, and predicted that, until the facility overhauled its “policies and procedures beyond recognition” and replaced its “current (correctional) staff,” it would not be appropriate for children. More surprising, a psychiatric report commissioned by the government defendants also questioned the “authoritarian milieu fostered by this excessive number of security personnel,” and criticized an atmosphere “capable of contributing to the development of unnecessary anxiety and stress for these children.” The report’s author, Richard Pesikoff, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine, concluded that it was “essential” to make changes at Hutto, in order to protect the mental health of the children.

Kevin, it must be said, was lucky. The plaintiffs’ lawyers soon figured out that the crayons and markers they had brought in to occupy the kids while they talked to their parents could also be politically useful. They were particularly so in the hands of articulate, indignant Kevin. One day, Kevin drew an American flag and wrote “Pleace help us” inside one of the stripes. He drew a picture of his common area, with sofas, tables, “police,” and “camra.” And he wrote a letter to Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, in a rainbow of colors: “Dear Mr. Priminster Harper, I don’t like to stay in this jail. I’m only nine years old. I want to go to my school in Canada. I’m sleeping beside the wall. Please Mr. Priminster haper give visa for my family. This Place is not good for me. I want to get out of the cell.” One of the University of Texas law students, Matthew Pizzo, placed Kevin’s handiwork in his satchel, and Barbara Hines later mailed it to journalists in Canada. Newspapers and bloggers there started covering Kevin’s story. Sometime around then, Hines recalls, she and her students were told by Hutto officials that they could no longer bring in crayons and markers.

After six weeks at Hutto, the Yourdkhanis were released, and the Canadian government offered them temporary resident permits. Students at Hines’s immigration clinic found the family a new lawyer in Toronto. The Yourdkhanis are now awaiting the outcome of a “humanitarian and compassionate” application for permanent residence, and their lawyer expects the process to be resolved by the end of the year. Majid is working at a restaurant; Masomeh is at home for the time being. In November, when I visited the Yourdkhanis in their high-rise apartment in Toronto, Kevin was excited about a new aquarium that his parents had bought for him. He had taken the bus home after school, grabbed an ice-cream bar out of the freezer, and was sprawled on the couch in shorts and a Darth Vader T-shirt, answering his parents’ questions about a field trip that his class had taken that day. He told me that he tried not to think about Hutto, but said, “It was horrible in there. People should be free, especially kids.” He said that he had given some thought to what he would do if anybody tried to take him away from Canada now. “I’d glue my foot to the ground,” he said. “And they’d have to cut me out of the ground. They’d have to take the cement with me!”

****

Immigration officials have said that, before the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, the average length of detention at Hutto was about fifty days. For some families, however, the stays were much longer. Liliam Restrepo, a thirty-six-year-old Colombian woman, was detained at Hutto, along with her ten- and twelve-year-old daughters, Paola and Andrea, for nearly a year. In Colombia, she was an activist with the Partido Liberal Colombiano, and says that she had to leave because of threats from paramilitaries. She now lives in a cramped one-bedroom walkup in South Boston, where she cleans houses for a living, and is awaiting an appeal on her asylum claim. She told me that children come out of Hutto with “a mind-set, a feeling they can’t forget. It’s bad for adults, but it’s worse for children. My kids play these games -- they still do -- where they are arresting people. My one daughter, she is afraid now of the police. She doesn’t want to walk by the police station at the end of our street. They have been trying to adapt to the life of freedom here, but it is difficult, because they unconsciously still feel they are detained. They can’t stop thinking and talking about prison.” Restrepo, a slim woman with long dark hair, was wearing a neatly pressed Corona Extra T-shirt and tiny gold hoop earrings. At her small, rickety kitchen table, she sat with her hands folded in her lap. The linoleum was cracked and worn, but somebody had tacked on the wall a calendar from a Chinese restaurant and an incongruous print of a couple of plummy-looking golfers on a lush green set of links. Life was clearly tough for Restrepo, but she was still glad to be out of Hutto. So were her daughters. Andrea recalled having to take a group shower with other kids, and being embarrassed; guards, she said, shouted at kids for running or making noise. What she missed most, she said, was “just being able to breathe real air.” The facility has an indoor gym, but when the Restrepos were at Hutto there were days at a stretch when kids were not allowed outside.

Salwan Komo, an Iraqi refugee who belongs to the Chaldean Christian minority, was confined in Hutto for more than five months, along with his wife, Neven, and their baby daughter, Miryam. Komo had a sister living legally in Detroit, and his wife had an aunt and a brother who were living in San Diego. In Iraq, Chaldean Christians have been subject to persecution and killings by Muslim extremists. The Komos had stopped going to church there and feared for their lives; most of the family had fled to Syria, where it had become increasingly expensive for Iraqi refugees to live and employment was nearly impossible to find. The Komos had tried, they said, to come to America the right way. They had presented themselves to the guards at the Mexican border in Southern California, and said that they were seeking asylum. Neven put it this way: “We came to the door, we -- how do you say? -- asked to come into your house.” If they had paid a smuggler and snuck into America, she noted, they probably would have avoided detention in Hutto.

In December, I met with the Komos in the immaculate little apartment where they now live, in El Cajon, near San Diego. It was a neighborhood of modest ranch houses and Spanish-style courtyard apartments, bejewelled with Christmas lights. Outside, the wind played punching bag with the giant inflatable polar bears and the manger scenes on the neatly tended front lawns. Inside, eighteen-month-old Miryam, in pink sweatpants and pigtails, was dancing to the Arabic-language music videos on a flat-screen TV, brandishing a cookie in one hand and a toy cell phone in the other. Komo explained that the family had recently been granted asylum, and that he now had a good job installing air-conditioning and heating units. Unlike the Yourdkhanis, he didn’t think Hutto should be shut down -- the government might need to put people there for short stays. “But if you have family and they can sign for you, they should let you leave,” he said. “You know, the baby was only a few months old. She was too small for a place like this. At five-thirty in the morning, they push open the door -- boom, boom, boom. We told them, ‘Don’t knock like this, please.’ During the day, she need to nap. It was noisy. My wife close the door, but then they come -- they call the captain and they make problems for us. We say, ‘Can we get some different food for her? She won’t eat this.’ They say, ‘If you don’t like the food here, go back to your country.’ But we didn’t come here for the food -- we had food. We come here for the safety. I say, ‘I’ll bring you the money. But when I’m in the jail I can’t do anything for my family.’ For two weeks, maybe one month, it’s O.K., but not for five months, nine days.”

Matthew Pizzo, the University of Texas law student, made a ritual of taking families to Wal-Mart when they were released. He says that Neven cried when she saw all the goods you could buy there. Pizzo remembers minding a three-year-old Iraqi girl as she played in the toy aisle while her parents bought clothes and baby food. A father with his own little girl asked Pizzo, “How old is your daughter?” Before thinking how the answer would sound to a stranger, Pizzo explained, “Oh, I’m not her father -- I’m her attorney.”

****

Last August, the A.C.L.U. settled its suit against the government. The agreement entails a number of changes at Hutto, including eliminating the head-count system, providing pajamas for children, letting kids keep a limited number of toys in their room during the day, making a priority of hiring people with experience in child welfare, and installing curtains around the toilets. In the months before the lawsuit was settled, Hutto had already started making changes: it got rid of the razor wire; expanded the length of educational instruction, first to four, then to seven hours a day; and began allowing detainees to wear their own clothes. Yet it seems unlikely that these changes would have been made without pressure from the A.C.L.U. lawsuit and from advocates like Barbara Hines and her students. The settlement also aimed to get people out of detention faster and stipulated that families at Hutto have their cases reviewed every thirty days, to determine if they could be released on parole or on bond.

Vanita Gupta, a staff attorney for the A.C.L.U. and the lead counsel on the Hutto case, says that she didn’t think the government would agree to close Hutto down, so the settlement was the next best option. “We are very proud of it,” she says of the settlement. “We fought for every word, tooth and nail. But at the end of the day do I feel detention is appropriate for children? No. The settlement forced the government to make tremendous changes, but these are still prison walls.”

The A.C.L.U. and the plaintiffs in the case -- all of whom Hutto released after the suit was filed -- could, perhaps, also count as a victory a written statement made by Julie Myers, the new assistant secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement with the D.H.S., during her confirmation process last fall. Detaining families would continue to be an important part of the agency’s operations, she wrote -- indeed, the effort would likely be expanded -- but “the physical structure of Hutto -- a former prison -- will not be used as the model for future facilities.”

It’s clear that Hutto is now a very different, and more humane, place than it was before the lawsuit. But, Gupta says, “it shouldn’t have taken the A.C.L.U. to make the government realize that holding innocent children in a converted medium-security adult prison is a bad idea.”

****

Why did the government turn to a former prison in the first place? It wasn’t the most cost-effective option. C.C.A. charges the government nearly thirty-four million dollars a year to run the facility. And whereas close supervision of a released immigrant costs only about twelve dollars a day, incarcerating one costs about sixty-one, according to a 2000 study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonprofit organization based in New York. It is clear that the government knew almost from Hutto’s inception that there were problems there. Last March, federal immigration officials found many “deficiencies” at Hutto, including inadequate sanitation and the lack of an immunization program for children -- chicken pox had broken out. (Parents, the report noted, were afraid to tell Hutto officials when they found rashes on their children, because they thought it would prevent them from being released.) The inspectors said that C.C.A.’s “overall attitude is of disinterest and complacency,” and concluded that the “overall review of the facility can accurately be rated as deficient.” This evaluation was issued months after demonstrators from local immigrant-advocate groups had started holding vigils outside Hutto, in December, 2006, attracting coverage by local news outlets.

A separate internal memo, which was obtained by the A.C.L.U., expressed particular concern about the high turnover among employees at Hutto. The memo’s author, whose name is redacted, complains about how hard it was to get straight answers from C.C.A. about staffing. (“Approximately five requests were made.”) The memo goes on to report that, of the three hundred and thirty-eight employees who had been hired since Hutto opened, in May, 2006, two hundred and three had quit or been fired by March, 2007. That meant that “the average length of employment for the 170 critical positions of detention officer, program facilitator, correctional officer, and case manager is 3.01 months. C.C.A. is losing staff as quick as they can hire them.” The memo blames low pay -- C.C.A. pays new employees $10.22 an hour, versus the county standard of $14.36. (In general, private prison companies pay considerably less than public prisons.) The memo continues, “Unfortunately, the caliber of some employees at the T. Don Hutto facility is not as high as it should be considering the nature of business that is required in managing a family residential detention facility.”

There is evidence that some immigration officials were skeptical about Hutto even before inspectors observed it in action. In August, several of the attorneys for the plaintiffs received a copy of a memo from someone who wanted to remain anonymous but who claimed to work in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in San Antonio. The memo, which the letter writer said had been composed by senior staff in the office before Hutto was reopened, concluded that it would be a poor choice for a family-detention center. For one thing, Hutto was a “hard” detention facility, with cells and bars and barbed wire. For another, the town of Taylor had “a minimal Hispanic population. This would make it difficult to obtain Spanish-speaking community members to provide religious, social, medical, educational services.” The memo also observed, with striking cynicism, that Taylor was too close to Austin, which had nonprofit and community organizations that “have typically been very strong advocates for immigrants.” (This observation proved prophetic -- it was Austin immigrant advocates, such as the students in Barbara Hines’s clinic, who exposed the problems at Hutto.)

U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks, a sixty-eight-year-old lifelong Texan, presided over the A.C.L.U. case. He is not a typical Austin liberal. He is the grandson and great-grandson of county sheriffs, and was appointed to the federal bench by George H. W. Bush. At the first hearing about Hutto, on March 20, 2007, he sounded irascible. More than once, he made the point that the immigrants housed at Hutto had intentionally broken U.S. laws by coming here without a visa. He admonished Gupta, the lead A.C.L.U. attorney, “Take the cotton out of your ears.” Yet, as Judge Sparks listened to testimony, he grew increasingly critical of the government. When he learned that children were required to be in the room even when their parents were sharing brutal stories with lawyers, he snapped at the government’s attorney, Victor Lawrence, saying that the rule “best not apply tomorrow.” Lawrence assured him that improvements had been made at Hutto, and would continue to be made. Sparks responded, “Why did there have to be changes in the first place? I mean, this is detention. This isn’t the penitentiary. Even in the penitentiary, the lawyers can see their clients one-on-one, and do not have to speak in front of children!” Lawrence said, “Your Honor, you know, part of this is the novelty of the facility itself. It’s a family detention center.” Sparks replied, “That’s right. And the government didn’t see fit to issue any regulations. The government hadn’t seen fit to go back into the Flores settlement for modification.”

The government argued that the 1997 Flores settlement applied only to unaccompanied minors coming illegally to the United States, and not to minors who entered the country with their parents. Even so, Judge Sparks implied, the government would have to establish clear rules for how to detain families safely and humanely. And although officials at Hutto might be making changes now, he noted, didn’t Lawrence have a feeling it was merely because the defendants knew, on account of the lawsuit, that “the hammer was coming down?” He said that he was beginning to wonder who was in charge “out there, either C.C.A. or the government. It’s very troubling to me.”

Lawrence returned to the government’s fundamental argument that the most important goal was to keep immigrant families together, and that Hutto had succeeded in that goal. As he put it, “It makes common sense to everybody in this courtroom that that’s a good thing -- as opposed to separating them.”

Judge Sparks replied, “But it would not be a good idea for them to hog-tie them and hang them up in lockers while they did it.” Admitting that he was talking more like a lawyer than a judge, he added, “The truth of the matter is there are ways to do it that are right and there are ways to do it that are wrong.”

****

If you visit Taylor, Texas, it’s not hard to see why people there might not want to give up on Hutto, and its two hundred or so jobs. On a drive into town, you pass a trailer park set amid spindly trees, and a fast-food chicken place that advertises “Livers and Gizzards Tuesday and Wednesday.” Farther on, you see the Lone Star Pawn Shop, where a sign promises cautiously, “We can cash most payroll checks.” Taylor has a couple of consignment shops, a few hair cutteries, several cotton gins, and two barbecue restaurants, Rudy Mikeska’s and Louie Mueller’s, that look as though they’ve been around a good long time. The sidewalks were mostly empty when I passed through on a sunny Monday morning, and on the side streets a number of the houses were ramshackle or derelict. A street leading to Hutto was cratered with potholes; the Landmark Inn and the liquor store were both abandoned.

The Hutto Correctional Facility opened in 1997, housing prisoners of the U.S. Marshals Service and overflow inmates from the county jail, as well as detainees displaced by hurricanes. Since the numbers were always fluctuating, C.C.A. was always struggling to find new customers, and in July, 2005, the company announced that it would have to close Hutto down. A last-minute reprieve came in December, in the form of an agreement with the federal government to detain non-criminal immigrants. The initial press release said nothing about children. At the time, Rick Zinsmeyer, a local resident, told the Taylor Daily Press, “The good part about it, and what Taylor gets out of it, is a lot more employees and more people coming into the town.”

José Orta, who is retired from the Air Force and works maintaining the town’s computer network, is one of a handful of people from Taylor who started protesting outside Hutto “once the word got around that they were holding children in there.” It’s been a lonely business. Orta told me, “I know people at my church who work at Hutto. When I try to talk to them about it, they just say, ‘It’s my job.’ My sister had a friend who worked there. She was a single mom and her job before that had been cleaning hotel rooms for minimum wage, $5.85 an hour. C.C.A. is paying, like, twice that. I said to her, ‘What if it were you and your son in there?’ That was literally something she’d never thought about. When she realized I was one of the vigil organizers, she stopped speaking to me or my sister.”

A few Taylor residents spoke out against Orta’s efforts. In a letter to the Daily Press, Michelle Hernandez wrote of Hutto detainees, “These individuals are eating three meals a day, even if it isn’t food that suits their palate. They have a dry, comfortable place to sleep, television and PlayStations, Xbox or whatever type of video games they have. The kids are getting an education, books to read, toys to play with. So many of our U.S. war veterans are homeless and don’t even get that. Who the hell is marching and complaining on their behalf?”

On the day I drove past Hutto, there was no one outside on the brown patchy grass, and no children on the play structure in the bare exercise yard. A stiff wind whipped the four flags at the entrance: one for Texas, one for the Department of Homeland Security, one for the United States, and one for the Corrections Corporation of America.

C.C.A. was founded in 1983 by a small group of politically well-connected entrepreneurs. One of them, Thomas Beasley, was the former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. Another, Terrell Don Hutto -- the prison’s namesake -- was once the director of the state prison system in Arkansas. He was also the defendant in a famous case that went before the Supreme Court, in 1978. In Hutto v. Finney, one of the first successful lawsuits by prisoners against a correctional system, the Court held that conditions in the Arkansas state prisons, which placed prisoners in solitary confinement for indefinite periods of time, constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Early investors in C.C.A. included Honey Alexander, the wife of Lamar Alexander, then the governor of Tennessee. Over the years, C.C.A. has continued to strengthen its political ties. The company’s PAC gave more than three hundred thousand dollars during the 2006 election cycle, overwhelmingly to Republican congressional candidates, and has given more than a hundred thousand so far for the 2008 elections. The company’s chairman, William Andrews, and its C.E.O., John Ferguson, have been generous donors to Republican senatorial and Presidential candidates. Philip Perry, who is the son-in-law of Dick Cheney, and who served as general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security between 2005 and 2007, lobbied for C.C.A. while he was at the law firm Latham & Watkins, to which he has returned. And C.C.A. spends a lot on lobbying. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2005, the year that Homeland Security awarded C.C.A. the Hutto contract, the company paid close to $3.4 million dollars to five different firms to lobby the federal government.

The company’s first contract, in 1984, was with the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service, for the building and oversight of an immigration holding center in Houston. C.C.A. soon began taking on contracts with counties, states, and the federal Bureau of Prisons. To win these entities over, private prison companies like C.C.A. argued that they could operate more cheaply and efficiently than the government could. It is certainly true that they can build prisons faster and cheaper, largely because they don’t need to seek voter or legislator approval. The relatively low salaries make running prisons cheaper, too. In 1999, two criminologists, James Austin and Garry Coventry, of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, concluded that “privately operated facilities have a significantly lower staffing level and offer significantly lower salaries than public state correctional agencies.” But Austin and Coventry also reported that private prisons had “a significantly higher rate of assaults on staff and inmates.” Austin, who is now a criminal-justice consultant, told me that “he just didn’t know” if that was still the case today -- nobody had done a comparable follow-up study. (That could be because it’s so hard to extract information from private prisons.) Austin noted, “In general, where there’s higher staff turnover you’re going to have rates of violence that are higher.”

Occasionally, stories about the operations of private prisons reach the public, and many are discouraging. In Youngstown, Ohio, C.C.A. built and oversaw a facility that housed prisoners from the District of Columbia. In the late nineties, it gained notoriety for endemic violence. In its first year of operation, there were six inmate escapes, twenty stabbings (two of them were fatal), and numerous other assaults -- figures that came to light only after a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of the inmates. Among other problems at Youngstown, prisoners prone to violent behavior were housed with the general population -- a situation that U.S. District Court Judge Sam Bell, who presided over the case, referred to as the “mixing of predators and their prey.” Bell ordered all maximum-security inmates to be removed from Youngstown. C.C.A. admitted no wrongdoing, but in order to settle the suit it agreed to pay $1.6 million to prisoners and seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in legal fees.

In 2004, inmates rioted and set fires at a private prison in Colorado run by C.C.A. A state investigation blamed mismanagement, and noted that C.C.A. had only thirty-three uniformed officers overseeing eleven hundred inmates when the riot erupted, and that the company paid its employees a third less than state prisons did.

Meanwhile, C.C.A. got into financial trouble by building prisons on spec -- putting up facilities for which it did not yet have contracts -- and by angering its stockholders with an ill-advised corporate restructuring. Over the course of 2000, C.C.A.’s stock price plummeted by ninety-three per cent. The company has since got back on much sounder financial footing. The hiring of John Ferguson, a former finance commissioner for the state of Tennessee, as C.E.O. helped. But the most important factor was the rise in immigrant detention. Since early 2002, the company’s stock price has more than quadrupled, even though several of C.C.A.’s immigrant-detention centers have been plagued by their own problems -- in 2005, a correctional officer at a San Diego facility was accused of raping a detainee.

During a conference call with investment analysts, in February, 2007, Ferguson was especially optimistic about the immigrant-detention trade. Noting that the elimination of the government’s catch-and-release initiative was “helping” the bottom line, he said that the number of beds that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was asking for had risen from twenty-one thousand to twenty-seven thousand in the previous two years. He also noted that President Bush’s proposed 2008 budget called for doubling the size of the border patrol, to more than eighteen thousand agents, before he left office. “So we feel very strong about the demand that is developing,” Ferguson said. (At one point, he noted that, in all its facilities, C.C.A. had “worked hard in a number of areas to reduce medical costs, including modifying a number of our contracts to reduce or eliminate our responsibility for medical expenses.”)

In the same conference call, Tracy Rabold, an analyst for Bank of America Securities, offered “congratulations on yet another good quarter.” But Rabold wanted to know if lawsuits were causing any “throttling back,” noting that lawsuits were “kind of part of the business, but there seems to be at least a little more publicity around some of the housing conditions that are being reported on the immigration side. Without getting into the philosophical discussion with that, I’m just curious if that is having any impact on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arrest policies or the volume that you guys have seen from them.” Ferguson said that more time was needed to assess the impact on the prison business. But William Andrews, C.C.A.’s chairman, told the analysts, “I just don’t want to leave anybody the impression that these facilities... are in any way substandard. In fact, they’re above standard.” The negative reports, he said, had come “from special-interest groups that are attempting to do away with privatization and the whole immigration situation. We welcome anybody to visit our facilities, and the family facility, particularly at T. Don Hutto, is almost like a home.”

****

Last May, a guard at Hutto was caught engaging in sexual activity with a female detainee in the cell that she shared with her young child. The guard was videotaped crawling out of the detainee’s cell -- trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid the camera -- on two occasions, once at 11:36 P.M., seven minutes after entering, and once at 11:47 P.M., following a ten-minute visit. Employees watching the security camera alerted their supervisors. The man on the videotape was seen “adjusting his pants around the belt area” as he left, according to a report on the incident by federal investigators. (The report -- or eighty of its four hundred pages, at least -- was obtained by the Taylor Daily Press.) It is unclear if the activity was consensual, but any sexual contact between correctional officers and inmates in a federal prison is a crime. At the time of the incident, however, the law applied only to prisons under the authority of the Department of Justice, and not to immigrant-detention centers, which are under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security. The guard was not prosecuted. (This past July, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of California, introduced legislation that closed the loophole.)

The guard case caused a stir, and the commissioners of Williamson County, where Hutto is situated, became briefly concerned about Hutto. Williamson County acts as the middleman in the agreement between the federal government and C.C.A., and it receives a dollar a day for each detainee at Hutto -- as much as a hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year. At a meeting in October, 2007, commissioners expressed worry that they might be named in any future lawsuits directed at Hutto or, as one commissioner put it, drawn into “the liability loop.” The county was considering withdrawing from the contract.

At the meeting, a large contingent of Hutto employees showed up, dressed in their new, friendlier uniforms -- maroon polos and khakis. They sat together in the audience, clapping and murmuring “Amen” as Evelyn Hernandez, the facility’s administrator, gave an emotional speech about Hutto. She declared that she and her employees “provide a safe, secure, loving environment” for the families detained there. Hernandez spoke feelingly of the importance of keeping families together. She herself had a four-year-old, and “could not imagine ever having that child taken away from me, under any circumstances.” She had moved to Texas from Idaho to take her job, she said, and she could have left her daughter with family in Idaho until she got settled. “But that child has to be with me,” she said.

A lawyer for C.C.A., when it was his turn at the microphone, assured the commissioners that “it is extremely difficult for someone to successfully sue a county in Texas in this arena.” The county really had no liability -- after all, it didn’t own the property or employ the people working there. Just in case, C.C.A. would indemnify the county, up to a quarter of a million dollars, for any future legal fees. The commissioners kept the contract.

Although the meeting had centered on matters of liability, it also exposed a deeper confusion. When we place families in a facility like Hutto, are we punishing them for coming to America? Or are we just keeping them somewhere safe, so that they don’t get separated or disappear while we figure out what to do with them? Or, rather, is our policy to try somehow to combine the practical and the punitive? After all, if the goal was simply to keep track of immigrants, in most cases an electronic monitoring bracelet would suffice. And if the goal was simply to keep families together, we could surely house them in something other than a former prison, in a place where employees are trained in child welfare and kids can get fresh air. The decision to house families in a former prison was, perhaps, not so arbitrary after all. At the meeting that day, Cynthia Long, one of the county commissioners, a woman in a businesslike red blazer and glasses, spoke about keeping families together. But she also said something that probably represented the gut feeling of a lot of people who are angry about illegal immigration. Long said, “The thing we forget is the adults who are being detained have broken the law.” Unfortunately, she went on, children sometimes “have to suffer with the sins of our parents” -- “to suffer, if you can call it that, because of their parents’ choices.”

Life Chances

adminn — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:35:00 -0500

The blue-ribbon commission has an inauspicious history in American public policy. Most often, assembling a dozen or two bipartisan grandees to deliberate soberly about a problem for several years is merely a way of evading the problem.
But there are exceptions. Though it will probably pass unnoticed, Dec. 22 of this year will mark the 20th anniversary of the creation of one of the most successful policy commissions in modern U.S. history: The National Commission on Children. Chaired by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the esteemed group four years later issued a report, Beyond Rhetoric, which was most notable for its unanimity. Without dissent, though not without struggle, 32 members -- who ranged from former Health and Human Services official and abstinence advocate Wade Horn, Allan Carlson of the paleo-conservative Rockford Institute, and Kay Coles James (later of the Bush administration and Regent University) on the right, to Bill Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman on the left -- accepted recommendations for a $1,000 refundable tax credit for children, improvements to child-support enforcement, a health-care program for children and pregnant women, and more investment in child care and Head Start.
While the unanimity was impressive, the report's reception suggested that the title Beyond Rhetoric was meant ironically, since the recommendations, and their $52 billion annual price tag, seemed hopelessly unrealistic at the time. Rep. Patricia Schroeder dismissed the report, predicting that "people are going to cite it for about a month" before it would be forgotten, and Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute charged that it was "so unrealistic it threatens to divert attention from the incremental increases that were ready to happen this year."
But then a funny thing happened on the way to irrelevance: Almost every one of the commission's recommendations became law. The State Children's Health Insurance Program passed six years later. A child tax credit became law the same year, and later was expanded, and made partially refundable as of 2001 -- so that working families who don't pay income tax would get a benefit. All the recommendations for child-support enforcement passed, and have since contributed to dramatic increases in collections on behalf of American children. Today, child support lifts more than a million kids out of poverty annually. The commission's, and Rockefeller's, most notable achievement might not have been legislative, but in co-opting prominent social conservatives and forcing them to acknowledge that if they cared about families and children, they had to put the federal government's money where their mouths were. Much of what became the first President Bush's "kinder, gentler nation" and the second's "compassionate conservatism" stemmed from that moment of apparent consensus.
The commission on children was the centerpiece of what might be called the first wave of kids-first politics. Beginning in 1985, when Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt devoted his entire State of the State speech to children, earning ridicule from the state's leading paper for talking about "quiche" rather than the "meat and potatoes" of Arizona politics, the idea began to take hold that children could lead us to the restoration of the promise of liberal politics. Just as Social Security and Medicare set the stage for activist government by protecting the elderly, supports for children would restore the sense of cooperation and mutual obligation that had been lost in the Reagan era.
A couple of years later, a memo from pollster Stanley Greenberg entitled "Kids as Politics" argued that despite the temptation to "view kids as soft, secondary and timeless... 'kids' in the present period are different. ... When candidates talk about kids," he contended, "they are talking about the fundamental economic and social terrain on which Democrats must run." Improvement in the living conditions and future prospects for children was not the only or even the primary goal. Rather, kids would help Americans "rediscover government": "Kids bring the Democrats back into the homes of average voters, speaking about economic issues of a fundamental sort. ... Kids and public policy are a natural and credible combination."
Twenty years later, while kids-first politics has been a policy success, it has not quite lived up to Greenberg's expectations. Rather, conservatives who understood the political power of children supported certain children's programs, such as S-CHIP, in isolation, cutting around them like paper dolls. Meanwhile, they continued to push successfully the agendas of tax-cutting and economic individualism that narrow the reach of such programs. Despite an increase in investment in kids' programs -- a study by the Congressional Budget Office in 1999 found that the tax credits, health-care expansion, and other benefits amounted to an increase of $45 billion in annual spending on kids in working families since 1984 -- and significant improvements in child poverty and other measures of well-being, child poverty rates began to crawl back up in this decade. The children who benefit from such programs live in the very families that are the victims of the economic insecurity conservative policies promote.
The failure to date of kids-first politics to transform the politics of social investment or help Americans "rediscover government" is not merely a problem for partisan Democrats or liberals. It is a problem for kids, since Head Start and quality child care cannot make up for the consequences for children of widening inequality and deepening insecurity for the families in which children are raised.
But the first wave of kids-first politics ended some time ago, with President Bush's veto of the expansion of S-CHIP marking its last rites. The choice between continued tax-cutting and positive government support for families with children can no longer be avoided. Yet faced with that choice, all of the Republican presidential candidates (including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who sometimes talks a good game but puts no policy substance behind his rhetoric) have chosen tax cuts. The social conservatives like Wade Horn have retreated to promoting abstinence and marriage. The "Sam's Club Republicans" that the young conservative writers Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam predicted in The Weekly Standard would marry social conservatism with activist government, in order to support the struggling families of the GOP base, have somehow not yet shown up.
So we now have the opportunity to relaunch a second wave of more robust kids-first politics. And as we do, we should ask what lessons the first wave -- the one bookended, roughly, by Babbitt's speech and the Bush S-CHIP veto -- offers for a renewed effort.
First, consensus isn't always helpful. Let's not be afraid of a fight. Rockefeller won unanimity only by paring back his commission's recommendations, particularly by watering down his health-care proposal. A high price was paid to enlist the hardcore social conservatives. But now that they have left the field, we have more flexibility to talk about a real, comprehensive vision for the future of children, one that might not win the support of everyone, but one that can command an enthusiastic majority.
Indeed, if the politics of children is going to have real purchase as politics, as Greenberg foresaw, it has to connect to the conflictual nature of politics. If everyone is for kids, then there is no real kids' politics -- it's not an issue in contested political space. Bush's veto of the S-CHIP bill, while obviously disappointing as policy, at least makes the lines clear: There are politicians who see children as a priority, and there are those who don't. (At the moment, these lines closely follow party lines, but that has not always been the case and will not be in the future.) Real kids-first politics should be unafraid of forcing that choice, with a confidence that in a high-stakes fight between tax cuts and children, children will prevail.
Second, kids-first politics has to be integrated with a broad vision of economic opportunity and the family. All research on education from early childhood through college shows that family income is the single most important variable in a child's success. No single programmatic intervention, whether it is first-rate child care or preschool or reform of elementary schools, compensates for the effects of poverty.
In his recent book, The Sandbox Investment, David Kirp highlights as an alternative to the preschool-focused campaign in the U.S. the British Labour Party's approach of setting a "galvanizing objective" -- the complete elimination of child poverty -- and orienting all policy around that goal. Once such a goal wins broad acceptance, the range of policies that would accompany it fall naturally into place. Under Tony Blair's government, spending on children tripled, and preschool quickly and quietly became nearly universal.
There would be limits to such an approach in the U.S., however. One is that the poverty line is too low: Lifting the income of a family of three to slightly over $17,000 is not going to dramatically change their children's life chances. (Poverty in the U.K. is measured relative to the median income, rather than as an absolute minimum, so the poverty line there for a family of three is more than $23,000 at current exchange rates.) More importantly, as Dalton Conley argued in a recent essay in The Boston Review, "The Geography of Poverty," it isn't income itself that has the biggest impact on kids, but the geography of concentrated poverty and the inability of parents who work long hours and make long commutes to spend enough time with their children. Money is time, and Conley suggests that the best ways to help kids would be by giving their parents higher wages or wage subsidies so they can work fewer hours, by providing paid leave, or by changing the geographic incentives that result in the poorest workers having the longest commutes to work. None of these are alternatives to high-quality child care and early education, but without them, those programs are pushing back against a social and economic trend that hinders their efficacy.
Issues of work and family, and time with one's children, have a political advantage in that they are relevant to the middle class as well as those near poverty, even if the problems of a two-professional couple and a single parent working two low-wage jobs are very different. Like child-support enforcement and preschool, this cluster of issues lends itself to universalist policies that benefit almost everyone. But not all the policies that help kids will be equally universal, and that is a third lesson of kids-first politics. The doctrine that the only programs that can win broad and lasting political support are those that, like Social Security and Medicare, benefit "a huge cross-class constituency," in the words of Harvard's Theda Skocpol, is a severe constraint on policies for kids. The result is often programs that offer a little something to everyone, and not enough to anyone to significantly improve economic security or open new opportunities. Tax credits of a few hundred dollars (which if they are not made refundable, actually disproportionately benefit the well-off) provide too little benefit to families who need them and too much to those who don't. But as Christopher Howard argues in The Welfare State Nobody Knows, the credo that "programs for the poor are poor programs," lacking public support or funding, is not borne out by recent events, such as the creation or expansion of S-CHIP or the steady and quiet expansion of Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit to support low-income working families. While Bush's veto of the S-CHIP expansion remains hugely unpopular, polls suggest that the Republican argument that the public benefit should not extend to middle-income families resonated with many voters. Freed from the compulsion to offer only universal benefits, no matter how watery, policy-makers will be liberated to design programs that truly lift up the kids who most need help. Such policies need to be coupled with a language of both moral obligation and the economic promise -- not just for the immediate beneficiaries, but for the economy as a whole -- of investing in children. (The companion piece in this issue on Illinois demonstrates how that state is moving toward universal, high-quality pre-K while giving priority to the poor.)
The first wave of kids-first politics led with silver-bullet programs and policies. The assumption was that individual policies that won broad elite support would succeed, and thus lead to a broader and more supportive politics for kids and families. A lesson from the partial success of that experiment is that you can win some policy changes without having much effect on the overall political or economic climate, or national priorities.
The next wave should start not with individual policies that win broad bipartisan consent, but with a comprehensive vision. The vision should be aspirational, not safe. A "galvanizing objective," such as the U.K.'s child-poverty goal, would certainly help. In the American case, perhaps a goal that all children should reach first grade ready to read would help organize all the key initiatives, from Head Start and universal pre-K, to nutrition and health care.
A further advantage of starting from a comprehensive goal such as poverty reduction or school readiness is that it addresses children as members of families. This counters the public anxiety, nurtured by the right, that liberals view public programs as alternatives to the family, and has the additional advantage, of course, that it is exactly the right approach to policy. Kids are not independent economic actors interacting with S-CHIP or Head Start. Family income (higher wages, Earned Income Tax Credit, child support, and programs to help non-custodial parents train and find work), family time (paid leave, expansion of unemployment insurance to cover family leave), family savings and economic security (baby bonds or individual development accounts), and the supports available to families within communities (such as the Harlem Children's Zone initiative) should all be priorities, whether the overall objective is poverty or readiness, in part because they make the other programs go further. Children's advocates should resist worrying that some of the dollars in such programs might support adults or support children only indirectly. It is adults who, indispensably, nurture children.
For all the investment generated by the last wave of kids-first politics, the U.S. social contract still socializes old age and privatizes childhood. Children bear the deepest scars from the "you're on your own" economy and society promoted by the last 30 years of public policy. Putting childhood itself -- and not just a few small programs -- at the center of political debate can serve to turn around that debilitating political assumption, for all of us.

Flexing Their Word Power

adminn — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:46:00 -0500

Watching a bunch of gangly middle-schoolers hopping around in their gym clothes at 9 in the morning brought back all sorts of bad memories from my own junior high school days. Still, just by watching Wilmington Middle School students in phys ed class one day last week, I learned a valuable lesson about generosity, voluntarism and just plain common sense.
I went to Wilmington to check out what I thought was a simple yet brilliant idea to help working-class students compete in the high-stakes world of educational testing.
We hear a lot about educational inequality, but we sometimes forget that inequality comes in a variety of forms. Just this month at a state summit on California's ethnic achievement gap, actor Edward James Olmos -- famous, in part, for playing a teacher in a movie -- galvanized an audience by focusing on the institutional bias that keeps too many Latino and black students from performing well.
But like so many other activists, he didn't mention that other form of inequality that's a whole lot more insidious, and for which there is no one to blame. Not unlike scores of other schools throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, Wilmington Middle School has a large share of students whose parents not only have few years of education but sometimes do not speak English fluently. Consequently, these kids don't grow up learning the words they'll have to know for tests that will evaluate them alongside children whose parents are native speakers with plenty of schooling.
As much as we push classroom teachers to help these students catch up, it's not fair to expect that they can do it on their own. Lord knows, American popular culture is no help. With few exceptions, television, movies and the latest song lyrics don't exactly raise children's intelligence quotients. All that may broaden a kid's vocabulary, but not always in ways that teachers or test makers appreciate. And even though schools like Wilmington enjoy healthy levels of parental involvement, it's not reasonable to think that all the moms and dads will start reading Norman Mailer or Gabriel Garcia Marquez any time soon.
But that doesn't mean that nothing can be done to change these children's educational environment.
At least that's what 26-year-old UCLA undergraduate Michael Bailey says. Last January, Bailey, a product of L.A. Unified who grew up in Lomita, no more than two miles from Wilmington, came up with an idea to help students at the middle school where his mother once worked as the attendance office clerk. After taking a class on "cognitive metaphor theory" -- the basic principle of which argues that when our brains come across something abstract or unfamiliar, we relate it to something familiar in order to understand it -- Bailey tried to come up with ways for kids to better familiarize themselves with words. The idea was to give kids an image of words and their definitions on an object; linking one with the other would make remembering words and their meanings easier.
First he considered cafeteria trays, then folders. Finally, he came up with a better medium: phys ed shirts. "Since our brain picks up words and images and relates them to something we've already experienced," he said, "my hope was that during state testing, students would have images of their classmates' shirts come to mind."
After school officials agreed to the plan, Bailey set up a nonprofit organization and raised about $5,000 to help pay for some of the shirts. Wilmington Middle's assistant principal, Peter Hastings, said that working with Bailey was a "no-brainer." Together they came up with a list of 100 words and simplified definitions that would go on the backs of the 6th-, 7th- and 8th-graders, one word and definition per shirt. They chose from a list of "high incidence" academic words, ones that kids are likely to encounter on tests.
But how does it play on the playground? Some cool kids at Wilmington denied knowing which word was on their back, even when they were wearing the shirt. But it wasn't hard to get them to cough up what words their classmates were wearing. Some words were more desirable than others. In fact, one of the most popular -- "available" -- was nixed by the powers that be for its unintended additional definition.
Sixth-grader Javier Mosquera was only too proud to say that his word was "evident." What does it mean? "To be clear and obvious," he said. Likewise, 11-year-old Rebecca Ramirez rattled off the definition of "contract": "an agreement between one or more people or parties." She seemed to know the definition of a lot of the other words her classmates were wearing.
Just after the experiment started, her phys ed teacher, Mr. Tussing, tested his students on how many of the T-shirt words they knew. "For the most part, they did real well," he said. "I'd like to see some more P.E. words, though, maybe words like 'aerobic,' or the muscle groups."
Bailey says he hopes to know more about whether his idea works when Wilmington's test scores are released at the end of the year. But I think success is already in the bag. When's the last time you heard of a phys ed teacher testing his students on their vocabulary?

Continuing the Investment

adminn — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:58:00 -0500

Deep Creek Elementary School is an education success story. In 2001, Deep Creek, where more than three-quarters of students come from low-income families and 80 percent are black or Hispanic, was one of the worst elementary schools in Baltimore County, Maryland. Its third-graders were reading at a first-grade level. But the new principal, Anissa Brown Dennis, expanded collaboration and professional development for teachers, implemented an aligned reading and math curriculum from pre-K through third grade, and offered summer learning and after-school programs for struggling students. Today, nearly three-quarters of Deep Creek students read on grade level, teacher and student morale is up, and the school has received local, state, and national recognition for its improvement. The key to Deep Creek's transformation: a clear vision of high-quality early education, starting in pre-K and continuing through third grade.
Advocates of universal pre-K are nothing if not visionary. They view universal pre-kindergarten as not just an end in itself but also a first step toward much more comprehensive public social welfare programs for preschool-age children and their families: prenatal care, parental leave, universal children's health care, and quality child care. For these advocates, the case for universal pre-K is also the case for new state-level systems, policies, and institutions that would serve children from birth through preschool.
Curiously, there's much less discussion of pre-K's potential to spur improvement in the schools children enter after they leave pre-K. The phrase "school readiness" is illustrative: If pre-K gets kids ready for school, then it's not school. As a result, school reformers focus on kindergarten through high school and stay away from pre-K advocacy, while early childhood advocates tend to focus on birth to age 5 and steer clear of school reform. That's a mistake. The universal pre-K movement isn't just about offering another social service: Pre-K advocates are actually building a whole new system of public education, and that has implications for the existing K-12 public education system. Without significant improvements in the public schools that children move on to after preschool, the pre-K movement will struggle to deliver promised results.
Research shows that high-quality pre-school has a positive impact on children's lives: Adult alumni of high-quality preschools have higher education attainment, employment, and earnings, and are less likely to be involved in crime than adults from similar backgrounds who didn't attend pre-K as children. Kindergarteners who attended good preschools also have stronger cognitive and academic skills than children who did not.
The trouble is, these academic differences disappear by third grade -- a phenomenon knows as "fade-out." That's fodder for conservative pre-K critics. During the 2006 debate over a referendum to establish universal pre-K in California, the Heritage Foundation, Reason Foundation, and other conservative groups published articles highlighting fade-out. The referendum failed. In an era of education accountability, politicians and the public expect preschool investments to improve elementary school test scores, so fade-out can undermine support for early education programs.
But evidence shows that fade-out is not a failure of pre-K; it is more deeply connected with children's ongoing education. Research by economics professors Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas has found that African American children who attend Head Start programs disproportionately go on to attend lower-performing public schools -- and this accounts for much of the fade-out in Head Start's academic results.
Rather than fearing fade-out, or trying to downplay it, pre-K supporters should highlight it as an argument for improving early elementary school programs. Education reformers and pre-K advocates should join forces to promote a comprehensive reform package that starts with high-quality, universal preschool for all 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds whose parents want it, followed by universal full-day kindergarten, to give kids more time to learn. In this vision, goals for children's learning and development -- including not just academics but also physical, social, and emotional development -- would be clearly articulated and extend from pre-K through third grade in a seamless progression. Lead teachers would all meet the same high-quality standard -- a bachelor's degree and demonstrated knowledge of how young children learn. This would allow teachers to work collaboratively across grade levels, so each year's learning builds on what children already know. (And ideally, talented preschool teachers without formal degrees would receive support and funding to pursue further schooling.)
The entire system would focus on ensuring children finish third grade with the skills they need to succeed in the next level of their education. Third grade is a turning point when children shift from learning to read to reading to learn. Children who can't read and do basic math well by then are unlikely ever to catch up. Indeed, proficiency by third grade is so critical that at least four states are known to use third-grade test scores to predict how many prison beds they'll need years later, reports the National Center on Education, Disability and Juvenile Justice.
Critics of the universal pre-k movement sometimes fret that pre-K advocates want to "extend public schooling down," to serve younger children for whom it's not appropriate. In fact, public education would actually benefit from extending some characteristics of high-quality early childhood programs up into public elementary and secondary schools.
This is precisely what happened at Deep Creek Elementary School and dozens of primary schools across the country that have implemented similar reforms. There, educators don't see preschool as just an add-on. Integrating pre-K and other early childhood programs with existing elementary schools can actually spur those schools to serve children better in the years following pre-K.
Let's look at the details: Most high-quality preschool programs focus on developing children's social and emotional competencies -- self-control, sticking with difficult tasks, resolving conflicts verbally rather than by force -- as well as academic skills. They build connections with parents and communities -- sometimes even using community-based providers to deliver early childhood education. They also often provide comprehensive services -- nutrition, health screenings, and parent education and involvement -- to address the myriad challenges that make it difficult for many children to succeed in school. These features are part of what make preschool programs successful, but too often they are woefully missing from elementary schools that are emotionally barren, devoid of resources to respond to the non- educational problems children bring to school with them, and disconnected from parents and communities. As advocates work to build publicly funded pre-K systems that emphasize social and emotional development, community connections, and comprehensive services, they're creating proof points that demonstrate how entire public education systems can deliver these things -- and why they must.
The universal pre-K movement also offers public education advocates and reformers models for academic reform. Changing existing systems is incredibly difficult; because states are building universal preschool systems from the ground up, there is more space for innovative thinking than in the established public education system. When it comes to evaluating the quality and effectiveness of schools and pre-K programs, for example, pre-K accountability systems use a much broader definition of quality than No Child Left Behind. Some use child assessments to measure pre-K learning, but they also look at resources and what actually goes on in pre-K classrooms: What kind of activities are children engaged in? How do teachers interact with children? A recent report from the National Early Childhood Accountability Task Force describes promising state and local models to evaluate the quality of pre-K programs. These models can help educators develop more nuanced ways to measure quality in public elementary and secondary schools.
States must also build new systems of teacher preparation and professional development to help experienced preschool teachers who lack a bachelor's degree meet new, higher education standards. Education reformers have long bemoaned the quality of K-12 teacher preparation and certification: Too often these programs fail to equip teachers with the skills to effectively teach diverse students, while their cost and time demands dissuade some potentially good teachers from entering the profession. New models to prepare preschool teachers could provide a potential leverage point for broader changes in K-12 teacher training.
Early childhood advocates and school reformers should be natural allies in building a better future for children, but too often they operate in separate spheres. The expansion of the pre-K movement, and the need to combat fade-out, create an opportunity to bridge that divide. By working together to build high-quality pre-K programs, education reformers and pre-K advocates can also open the door for improvements in the elementary and secondary education system. This kind of collaboration can make stories like Deep Creek's not the exception but the rule.

Baby Bonds Pay Bipartisan Dividends

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:33:00 -0400

At a recent campaign stop with the Congressional Black Caucus, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said, “I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account.”
That was enough to generate a few headlines and some right-wing outrage. The Drudge Report was quick to tweak one of its favorite targets and drive some Internet traffic with a bold banner, “A Bond for Every Bassinet.”
The conservative Washington Times and New York Post blasted the idea within 24 hours, and Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani called it “pandering” and promptly incorporated it into his next fundraising appeal.
But with some pundits denouncing the proposal as some hyperliberal expansion of the welfare state, it’s worth noting that this idea has been simmering for some time in both Democratic and Republican policy circles.
Unfortunately, much of the discussion that followed Clinton’s remark occurred without any context at all beyond the $5,000 figure, which is a real attention getter to be sure.
For starters, the New York senator was not poised to unveil a multibillion-dollar initiative designed to remake the social contract. It hasn’t been included in any of her formal campaign proposals, but it wasn’t an idea just cooked up on the campaign trail, either.

In a July 2006 speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton proposed giving every newborn child a $500 endowment, calling it a “baby bond” to distinguish it from a similar proposal championed by the very conservative then-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.).
But this time, Clinton didn’t say $500; she said $5,000. And at that level, the proposal not only is novel but also costs about $18 billion more per year. The unscripted musing of the sure-footed candidate has made more news than the substance of the proposal. That would hardly be a first, but it remains a shame since this is still a good idea, with good politics to boot.
In the past year alone, there have been similar proposals to use children’s accounts to support these purposes, which have been promoted by the likes of Republican Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), as well as Democratic senators such as Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Joe Biden (D-Del.).

Just last week, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers reintroduced a bill called the America Saving for Personal Investment, Retirement and Education, or ASPIRE, Act, which provides every baby with a $500 endowment, untouchable for 18 years and then restricted to paying for college, putting a down payment on a home or saving for retirement.
These policymakers have crossed the aisle because they recognize that with the country’s growing wealth gap, low personal savings rate and poor financial literacy, we need to find ways to seed more savings and property ownership.
Access to even a modest pool of assets can provide an essential element of economic security, helping people weather income shocks and take advantage of strategic opportunities.
Much of this simply can’t be achieved through social insurance that is geared toward specific risks like unemployment or very low pay, or specific services such as health care. Assets provide the flexibility families need to navigate a volatile economy.
And there are a number of benefits to starting this savings process at birth. Not only do you get to maximize the advantage of compound interest, but these accounts can become a teaching tool to deliver the fundamentals of financial education -- a primary skill for navigating our 21st-century economy.
This is actually the approach that they are using in the United Kingdom, which is already implementing a similar accounts-at-birth proposal with support from both the Labor and Tory parties.
If we engage in a dialogue that goes beyond headlines, the merits of baby bonds could garner support from progressives and social conservatives alike. That’s because, at its core, this policy is about ownership and opportunity, offering a little something for everyone.
Supporters of President Bush’s ownership society should feel right at home providing a means to spread property ownership through the population, which might change how people think, behave and plan for the future -- ultimately promoting self-sufficiency in the process.
Liberals are more likely to focus on how savings accounts can serve as investments in children that can create opportunities down the road to overcome economic disparities.
We’ve already seen the potential of this idea to create some common ground.
When debates on Social Security had broken down along partisan lines in 2004 and 2005, Santorum and then-Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) were able to momentarily sing each other’s praises as the initial co-sponsors of the ASPIRE Act. Perhaps Clinton, or some other Democratic standard-bearer, will find other strange bedfellows to work with who see creating children’s savings accounts as an investment worth making.

Serving Our Young Adults

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 14:44:00 -0400

Many churches are developing programs to serve young adults. Many are investing in young adult coordinators in order to help grow their church.
However, there is another reason for churches to focus on young adults -- the critical needs of the early young adult population in our nation.
The violence at Virginia Tech last April perpetrated by a disturbed young adult is a tragedy beyond belief. It calls attention to the challenges faced by an often overlooked age group.
While American society has appropriately focused on the needs of teenagers in recent years, we should not lose sight of the needs of young adults as well.
The 1999 Columbine High School shootings were carried out by teenage students, Dylan Klebold, age 17, and Eric Harris, age 18, who shot a teacher and 12 students, and then shot themselves.
Cho Seung-Hui, a 23-year-old from Centreville, Va., carried out a similar rampage at Virginia Tech, taking the lives of 32 classmates and professors before committing suicide.
The parallels symbolize what many in the research community see -- some of the same problems we used to worry about for teenagers are now in crisis mode for young adults.
Social researchers have recently pointed out that teens are getting into less “trouble” than they used to. Federal and state policies and changes in attitudes have helped reduce teen pregnancy by 31% since 1991. According to the Foundation for Child Development’s national Child Well-Being Index (CWI), violent crime involvement, teen pregnancy, and cigarette, alcohol and drug use among teenagers have fallen over the past generation. As a result, the CWI’s “safety and behavioral” indicator was 36% higher for teenagers in 2005 than in 1975. Dr. Ken Land of Duke University says that part of this improvement can be explained by increased protectiveness by parents who shield their children from risks.
While teen pregnancy rates may have fallen, there is a silent epidemic of an increase in unwanted pregnancies among Americans aged 20-24. According to Kelleen Kaye of the New America Foundation, “Childbearing by singles has grown by over one-quarter since 1990, and young adults account for roughly 60 percent of this increase. Births to young, single adults surpass even the ‘epidemic’ levels of teen childbearing, with 550,000 births annually (71 per 1,000 single women ages 20-24)."
While drug and alcohol use among teens overall has declined, binge drinking among college students puts vulnerable young adults at risk, and many young adults go through college unprepared for the behavioral challenges and pressures placed on them.
American parents have increasingly focused on protecting their teenagers. Many have kept their children away from the dangers of unsupervised activity through schedules and indoor programming. According to Dr. Land, this tendency to stay indoors has contributed to the epidemic of overweight children, but has kept them out of some trouble. However, children grow up in a world with lots of stress, and in their efforts to protect, parents must be sensitive to the additional pressures they may add.
It is enough to make us question how we protect and prepare young adults to deal with dangers they will face when parents and home churches are no longer there to help on a daily basis.
Are our families, schools, and churches sufficiently preparing our young people to make good choices when they leave the relative support systems of their homes and home churches? How do parents prepare their children to make good decisions when they leave the nest?
Can the pressure that parents put on teenagers to keep them safe and help them succeed lead to unintended emotional and behavioral consequences when they become young adults?
What are the appropriate supports civil society and churches should put in place once young people reach age 18?
Should institutions of higher learning find ways to better identify and address emotional, spiritual and mental health disturbance among young adults?
How can our churches help teach the values and guide their young adults so that they receive the critical care and decision-making skills that will serve them, the church and our nation?
How should churches reach out to universities and to young adult communities to provide them support?
The needs of our teenagers are great and America must make better efforts and investments to improve the well being of our children, including teenagers.
Yet young adults should not be forgotten.
There are concrete steps that churches can take to make a difference for this age group.
First, they can emphasize young adult ministry as a mission area in addition to being an evangelism field. Too often young adult ministry is seen as area of evangelism. Every mainline Protestant church that I know of is asking itself, “How can we attract more young people?” to help address declining membership. The assumption that young adults are well off and a group to be sought after by evangelism committees misses what research is revealing -- that young adult ministry is a mission field. Churches that look to support and meet the needs of young adults will be providing an important social function and are more likely to bolster attendance.
Secondly, the needs of young adults are significant enough to be considered at a presbytery level. There are a lot of best practices that young adult ministers have to share with each other and presbyteries would do well to bring them together to examine how the presbytery can leverage resources to best serve this age group. In our presbytery, we are planning a retreat next April to focus on the needs and interests of young adults.
Third, churches should follow up with their college age students when they leave for school. Many early young adults do not easily find a church home in college, graduate school, or during their early transient years. One Presbyterian church in Ohio sends food and letters to its college students to let them know they are praying for them and another holds a weekend get-away each year for its young adults who are back for the summer.
Finally, individual churches must invest in campus ministry. I know from my own experience with loss as a college student how valuable campus ministry can be to young people at critical times. Campus ministers at and near Virginia Tech responded admirably to the needs of students during the tragedy. For many young adults, campus ministers are often on the front lines of identifying needs and connecting young adults with help before a crisis occurs. At a time when support for campus ministry at a national church and at a presbytery level is being cut, those who minister to young adults on campuses depend on their local churches even more to keep their ministries going.
Chances are that your church is not far from some college or vocational school or graduate community that needs your support. The support of local churches for young adult ministries within churches and on campuses has never been more important.
Jesus said that if we make the tree good then the fruit will be good. By investing in programs that serve the needs of young adults, churches can extend branches of care that connect young adults to their faith roots in ways that can bear good fruit at a critical time.

Teach Your Children About Interfaith

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:45:00 -0400

One of the great fears that parents and church leaders have about their youth engaging in interfaith dialog is that they will lose their connection to their own religion and will end up rejecting and leaving their faith, maybe even converting to another religion as a result. My experience as a Christian pastor has been just the opposite -- I have watched young people become stronger in their own faith through exposure to other traditions.
Personal relationships matter a great deal in influencing how individuals come to faith, switch faiths or grow in faith. Most of us are part of the tradition of our parents and stay in a tradition that comes to us through the personal relationships in our home and our place of worship. High school students often deepen their faith because of a role model. College students often grow in faith because a person of faith was there for them during a time of pain. Young adults often stay with their faith because someone they admire is in the faith.
In encouraging people to stay in their faith, actions speak louder than words. St. Francis of Assisi once said, “Preach always, use words if necessary” to convey the concept that we share our faith by what we do as well as by what we say. As a pastor I try to live the Gospel of Christ, who modeled how we are to live by his actions as well as by his words. Regardless of our tradition, the everyday personal interactions of people of faith have a great impact on others staying in their traditions.
When young people begin to look beyond their faith background to engage people of different faiths, personal interactions often cause them to consider their own tradition as never before. If we grow up in a world where everyone is similar, we too often think about faith in cultural terms without analyzing the doctrine itself. Interacting with people who are different can cause us to think more deeply about how our own identity is shaped and developed.
One of the benefits of interfaith dialog is that in order to explain our faith to others we must come to terms with what we actually believe, and that often brings us to a deeper place in our own faith. To explain one’s own faith requires synthesizing those parts of the faith that one believes in.
For example, Farah is a Sunni Muslim girl from rural Ohio. She attends a high school outside of Cleveland and is one of the few Muslims at her school. She is often asked what it is like being a Muslim. She says that in the process of engaging with non-Muslims and explaining her faith she has come to experience a deepening of her belief through her own reflection.
Sometimes conversations can cause people to develop a pride in their background that they did not have before. In college, I found that being one of a few from my region of the country meant that people often asked me what it was like to grow up there. I had assumed while growing up that everyone was like me. When I encountered people who were very different I began to think about my community in a new way. I developed a sense of pride. I saw myself as a representative of my state and region and it increased my feelings about, and loyalty to, my community. When we are engaged in conversation with people from others faiths we learn about ourselves and clarify our beliefs as we explain our religion and often we develop a sense of pride as a result.
A recent study by researchers in California and Canada found that older siblings often do better in school than younger ones because they end up tutoring their younger siblings. The process of tutoring helps the older students learn because they have to explain information to the younger ones. The researchers concluded that the key driver of success for those older students was the premise that humans learn by explaining.
I have seen, through interfaith dialog, that young people of many traditions who once did not care much about their religion before the dialog, suddenly become inspired by the commitments of others to return to the faith of their roots.
If parents and religious leaders want their young people to develop a faith that is deep in their tradition and broad in the world, they should encourage, not discourage, interfaith interactions. Faith that is tested, contrasted and explained is faith that is most likely to be internalized and to endure.

Forget Easy Money

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 07:12:00 -0400

Countrywide Financial, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, has a curious new idea -- or, more precisely, an old one. No longer will it use wads of Chinese cash recycled through Wall Street to make subprime loans to unqualified borrowers. Instead, it will take in deposits from small savers and lend them out to people who might actually repay them -- just like that humble thrift institution president George Bailey did in It’s a Wonderful Life.
Imagine: a bank that promotes thrift! This could be the start of something big. Writing recently in the American Banker, Eugene Ludwig, a former comptroller of the currency, advised financial institutions to stop relying "on the easy money that comes from wholesale funding" and to concentrate instead "on harder-to-get core deposits." How quaint. Remember when banks actually tried to instill the savings habit by going into schools and helping kids set up small passbook accounts? Today, the first experience most younger Americans have with a bank comes during freshman orientation at college, when they come across a table laden with giveaways and credit-card applications.
This return to thrift comes none too soon. Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans lost their homes in one year -- and we’re not even in a recession, at least not yet. But we’re still on course to see 2 million foreclosures in 2007, afflicting one in 62 households. That’s a 67 percent increase from 2006, according to RealtyTrac. The Federal Reserve’s recent decision to cut its benchmark rate by half a point, while widely praised on Wall Street, will do little to stop the slide.
Also not since the Great Depression have Americans saved so little. Even with unemployment at historically low levels, Americans spent more than they earned in both 2005 and 2006 -- and charged the difference. Household debt, not including mortgages, now eats up nearly 15 percent of disposable income -- more than food and gasoline combined. One in seven families is dealing with a debt collector. Children today are more likely to live through their parents’ bankruptcy than their parents’ divorce. Americans’ stunning lack of savings not only brings personal tragedy but also is causing the dollar to plummet against all major currencies, jeopardizing our economic growth and threatening the financial system worldwide.
What’s going on? No doubt, some of us like to shop too much, but it’s also true that the "fixed costs" of middle-class life have soared. Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School, shows that while family incomes have gone up in the past generation, the costs of health care, education, housing, child care and transportation have risen even higher.
Meanwhile, not only does the government itself borrow as though there were no tomorrow, primarily through unfunded health and pension plans, but it promotes what David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values calls "anti-thrift" institutions. Today, 41 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico run lotteries, and 11 states encourage casinos. Government has also allowed for the mainstreaming of other anti-thrift institutions -- some charging annual interest of more than 500 percent -- that once existed, if at all, only in the shadows of society. Payday lenders, rent-to-own stores, auto-title lenders, some franchise tax preparers and chain pawn shops are all now as common across the landscape of middle-class America as Applebee’s.
After the terrorist attacks of 2001, President Bush told us that the patriotic thing to do was to shop. But Osama bin Laden is still out there, gas is more expensive than ever, the credit card is maxed out and our homes are depreciating. There’s a better way: the old-fashioned virtue called thrift.
Historically, thrift didn’t carry its current association of being cheap or stingy. Rather, it meant the wise use of resources. It meant an abhorrence of waste, whether of raw materials, time, energy or money. In short, it meant conservation.
To conserve money, working-class men and women banded together to create "thrift" institutions. Before these institutions were deregulated and taken over by the fast-buck crowd in the 1980s, they provided a staid but reliable vehicle for building a nation of "freeholding" middle-class homeowners and small-scale entrepreneurs. Most Americans understood, until the triumph of the anti-thrift institutions, that their own freedom from wage slavery -- and, indeed, the civic health and wealth of the republic -- depended on the savings habit and the widespread ownership of unencumbered small properties that it makes possible.
Today, by contrast, while many Americans understand the need to conserve energy and natural resources, they have trouble seeing what any of that has to do with credit cards and subprime mortgages. But conserving financial resources is not only still essential to individual liberty; it is also essential to moderating wasteful consumption and saving the environment.
Reviving the American thrift ethos won’t be easy, and it will probably take at least a generation. But we can take some small steps now that would make saving easy, automatic and frequent. Our goal should be to generate new savers as well as new savings -- in sharp contrast to current government policy, which allocates considerably more than $100 billion a year in tax breaks to high-income earners who would save anyway.
First, we should take advantage of one of the most powerful forces in human nature: inertia. Studies in behavioral economics show that when new hires have to opt out of a 401(k) retirement plan, as opposed to having to opt in, savings rates skyrocket. Also, building on the "Opportunity NYC" initiative (which is being privately funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and several other donors), governments, civic-minded corporations and philanthropies could make automatic savings deposits to individuals who engage in socially desirable behavior. Finish high school, volunteer in your community or buy an energy-efficient appliance, and your savings account receives a deposit.
Technology, if fully exploited, can also make the cost of maintaining a bank account far lower, thereby giving financial institutions a greater incentive to serve small savers and giving freedom to the "unbanked" poor from the gouging fees that payday lenders charge to cash checks. Imagine that your debit card is also an interest-paying savings card, to which your employer, the Internal Revenue Service and other entities can make automatic deposits. Some innovative firms are already offering such a product, which combines low cost with convenience and security.
Meanwhile, regulators should encourage more community-focused banks, credit unions and thrift institutions. These can resume their historical role of promoting thrift by helping customers become savers as well as (eventually) homeowners and small-business owners.
Congress should do its part as well. The bipartisan New Savers Act, for example, makes it easier to open bank accounts, buy savings bonds, put money away for college and receive financial education. Another bipartisan measure, the Automatic IRA Act, encourages automatic payroll deposits into IRAs. Other proposals authorize tax credits for low-income savers, as well as remove savings penalties for those on public assistance.
Finally, to usher in this "new thrift" across generations, Congress should establish a lifelong savings account for all children when they are born -- a reality in Britain and elsewhere and an idea that’s rapidly gaining bipartisan momentum in the United States.
If you’re an American born in the 20th century, thrift probably strikes you as a musty, downscale word -- reminiscent of used clothes, aged relatives who wrapped their sofas in plastic or perhaps the grandmother who saved Green Stamps. But it’s worth remembering, as did generations of Americans struggling up from poverty and privation, that thrift is still the essential virtue that makes the American dream possible.

Help Kids via Junk Food Tax

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 10:41:00 -0400

In a few days, Congress will return to reauthorize the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP. The program will pay for expanded coverage for children through an increase in cigarette taxes. The logic is to raise revenue while discouraging a behavior harmful to child health. Instead of a cigarette tax, however, Congress should address the health problem that research indicates is the greatest crisis facing America’s young people by taxing junk food instead.
The new epidemic facing American children is obesity. The Foundation for Child Development’s 2007 Child Well-Being Index has found that the overall health of America’s children is the lowest since the index began in 1975. What is driving down the overall health of American children is the epidemic of obese and overweight kids. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that the percentage of Americans ages 6 to 11 who were overweight hovered in the 4 percent to 6 percent range during the 1960s and 1970s, but exploded to around 11 percent in the early 1990s, increased to more than 15 percent by 2000 and has continued to climb in recent years.
On the other hand, the index has found that American children are smoking less. According to the "Monitoring the Future" study at the University of Michigan, the percentage of 12th-graders in America who have tried cigarettes has dropped from more than 75 percent in 1978 to 47 percent in 2006. The percentages of 12th-, 10th- and eighth-graders who use cigarettes daily also fell markedly between 1996 and 2006: from 22 percent to 12 percent of 12th-graders; from 18 percent to fewer than 8 percent of 10th-graders; and from 10 percent to 4 percent of eighth-graders.
The obesity trend, however, is heading in the wrong direction. Researchers at the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released a study last month predicting that unless behaviors change, by 2015, 75 percent of adults and nearly 24 percent of children and adolescents in the United States will be overweight or obese.
One of the significant contributing factors to this epidemic has been increased consumption of junk food -- high-fat fast food, high-fructose corn syrup soft drinks, etc.
America is not doing right by its children. There are many ways policymakers could go about taxing junk food; policy proposals are out there to raise the costs of everything from hamburgers to sodas. The best place to start might be the root ingredients, such as sweeteners, MSG and trans-fats.
Funding SCHIP from junk food has the potential to raise more money, more evenly across the country, with less impact on the economy and in a less regressive way than with cigarette taxes. Compared with smokers, whose demographic has become more concentrated among lower-income groups, those who consume junk food are a much broader group. Therefore, the tax increases from junk food would be spread more broadly in the economy.
America should continue to be concerned about tobacco use. Cigarettes are addictive and deadly. However, public education, tobacco settlements, anti-smoking campaigns and higher taxes on cigarettes over the past few decades have drastically lowered cigarette smoking among children. It is promising that such methods have been so successful in reducing smoking rates among young people. We should use the same tactics to tackle childhood obesity.
Raising the costs of junk food alone would not remedy all child health problems related to obesity. Exercise is also a critical step.
Yet if Congress is going to finance SCHIP expansion through a revenue increase that addresses a health problem for children, it should follow the research and include junk food.

Mr. Successful

adminn — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 01:52:00 -0400

Anyone who's ever been to a wedding knows not everybody can stand up in front of a roomful of people and just talk. Anthony Pico discovered by accident, at 15, that he has a gift for doing that. He's 18 now, and he's become so well known as a public speaker on the subject of foster care, which he knows well, he was appointed to a blue ribbon commission aiming to reform the largest foster care system in the country, the one in California, Anthony's home state. In addition, Anthony still speaks to judges and legislators all over the state, and the country, sometimes every week. But it's gotten complicated...
Listen to the radio segment using the player above, or download it as an MP3 file at the bottom of this page.
Related Legislation
There's a new bill in Congress that would make 21 the new 18 for kids in foster care, give them a few extra years of housing and support if they need it. A small number of states, and isolated counties, have tried this on their own. They've found that, while foster care is a deeply flawed system, if kids are still in the system at 18, a few extra years seems to get more of them out of their sticky teenage years and into stable adult lives. Read more about the bill here: http://boxer.senate.gov/news/releases/record.cfm?id=275098