op-ed – Tonight at Dawn Media

Text by K. Cecchini @tonightatdawn/Images by WNYC’s New Tech City

Tonight at Dawn is growing and I am thrilled. All the same, I’m at odds with the process. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to grow TaD more, while another is to have less screen time.

I’m an oxymoron.

So, I welcome your ideas for the war on both fronts, while I share some of the things I am trying here:

📌Bored & Brilliant. This is for all of us who spend so much time in proximity to our phones that it begins to feel like a security blanket; I simply leave it at home sometimes when I go for a walk or at least leave it in the other room. With all the other devices. It helps me wean myself off of them and, according to WNYC’s New Tech City “Bored & Brilliant” challenge, it leaves more space in my brain for creativity.

📌Watched stats never grow. It’s motivating to see your own progress and reach, but just because I’m idle doesn’t mean I have to check stats or any of the other streams on my phone – Facebook, Twitter…I’m looking at you. A break, should be a break.

📌No screen-time before bedtime. There has been plenty of data that points to how viewing a screen before bed disturbs healthy sleep patterns. By the same token, although I use my phone as an alarm, I don’t need to do anymore with it than to shut it up when it wakes me up.

📌A little bit of the old school goes a long way. I am starting to grow my ideas more and more on paper-discarded notebooks-before moving to the computer. Not only does it reduce screen time, for me, it seems a change in medium helps to break my writer’s block. Perhaps paper and pencil also supports better developed planning as a 2008 Princeton journal study included evidence that people plan their writing more when given a paper task rather than a computer task.

📌Attack of the apps. Deleting apps, from games to the social media varieties, has helped free me from the screens; I am not a gamer so why am I getting sucked into Words with Friends on my phone? Also, if I have to log into sites such as Facebook, I know I am so much less likely to whittle away the minutes on it as opposed to having it ready on an app.

📌Push off. Push notifications irritate me. On that note, I’ve always only allowed them for text messages and telephone calls. Most of the apps that offer it are providing notifications of the most non-urgent updates. Not for nothing, Tonight at Dawn will survive even if I don’t respond to a comment for 2 hours. Forgive me, dear readers.

Click here to download more detox messages.

Text by Kimberly Cecchini

Orange is the New Black returned to Netflix yesterday with a second season ready for binging. While I am certainly tuning in to see Chapman’s fate with her wrecked romances and her Christmas run in with Pennsatucky, I am also interested in some of the social issues the show embeds at times. Some of the story lines are fodder for conversations about the failures of our social systems from education to job programs to racial inequities to the lack of rehabilitation and support for released prisoners.

Having worked with youth whose childhoods are lived within institutional settings, I am particularly interested to see the show follow Taystee’s evolution as her situation is a result of compounded failures in our social nets. Danielle Brooks’ character is a so-called product of a childhood without any familial structure. Towards the beginning of the season, she is thrown a party to celebrate her release by fellow inmates, but, by the end of episode 12, she is back in an inaugural orange jumpsuit and to her job in the prison library. Her good friend, Poussey (Samira Wiley) confronts Taystee about her return in the face of Poussey’s own remaining sentence, “I know you ain’t telling to my face right now that freedom was inconvenient for you.”

Taystee pleads for Pousseey’s understanding and indicates some of the underlying causes of recidivism:

“It ain’t like that, P. Minimum wage is some kind of joke. I got a part time working at Pizza Hut and I still owe the prison 900 dollars in fees I gotta pay back. I ain’t got no place to stay. I was sleeping on the floor of my second cousin apartment like a dog. And she still got 6 people in two rooms. One of the bitches stole my check. I got lice. Everyone I know is poor in jail or gone. Don’t nobody ask about how my day went. I’m kind of fucked up in the head ya’know. I know how to play it here; where to be and what rules to follow. I got a bed. And I got you.”

At the beginning of the second episode of the new season (where I paused to go to sleep last night), we see a younger version of Taystee at an adoption fair where her hopes for a family are dashed. There are glimpses in the first season where the viewer is getting a perspective beyond her playing the “clown” and we see an intelligent woman whose promise has been unrealized. Brooks’ character speaks to the large number of youth who spend their childhood in the “system” which does not model how to function outside of it and prisoners who are ill-prepared to renter society.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a 2005 study unearthed this sobering result,

“In a 15 state study , over two-thirds of released prisoners were rearrested within three years.”

These numbers give truth to the words of prison reform activist, Carol Leonard (prisonreformmovement.wordpress.com) when I asked her what she thought was the greatest contributor to recidivism,

“No rehab and a lack of social/life skills- we are warehousing human beings- the corrections system is not correcting anyone. Prisons are not about rehabilitation and that needs to change!”

I am looking forward to continuing my discussion with Carol and other prison reform advocates regarding recidivism and other issues that has bolstered the United States to lead the world in incarceration rates; we have 5% of the world population yet we incarcerate 22% of the world’s prisoners. In a country that prides itself on freedom and opportunity, there is clearly something that is broken.

Whether or not the second season of Orange is the New Black delves more deeply into the myriad of problems that feed the prison system in the United States or not, it’s still can be an excuse for much needed conversations. For the sake of our nation and our communities, we need to have all of these conversations on education, race, inequities, prison reform, the privatization of prisons, etc. If you have any insight into any related topic, please comment on this piece and perhaps Tonight at Dawn can interview you for upcoming post. In the meantime, please check back for a follow up article on prison reform.

References:

Cecchini, Kimberly. “Carol Leonard, Advocate.” E-mail interview. 27 May 2014.

Orange Is the New Black/Fool Me Once. Netflix. N.d. Television.

“Recidivism.” Bureau of Justice Statistics Reentry Trends in the U.S.:. N.p., n.d. Web. 05 June 2014.

“You Might Also Be Interested In:.” U.S. General and Prisoner Population as a Percentage of The… N.p., n.d. Web. 06 June 2014.