Interesting Reads 03 October 2014

This week’s interesting reads include articles about people locked up in jail without a trial, how the law victimizes those who have been abused, the myth of the self-made man, the cost of fighting ISIS and more. Cheerful stuff to enjoy on a beautiful fall day!

Three Years on Rikers Without Trial – “Of the eight million people living in New York City, some eleven thousand are confined in the city’s jails on any given day, most of them on Rikers, a four-hundred-acre island in the East River, between Queens and the Bronx. New Yorkers who have never visited often think of Rikers as a single, terrifying building, but the island has ten jails—eight for men, one for women, and one so decrepit that it hasn’t housed anyone since 2000.” The New Yorker

The self-made man, history of a myth: From Ben Franklin, to Andrew Carnegie, to Sophia Amoruso. – “In this, he is typical. When the Pew Economic Mobility Project conducted a survey in 2009—hardly a high point in the history of American capitalism—39 percent of respondents said they believed it was “common” for people born into poverty to become rich, and 71 percent said that personal attributes like hard work and drive, not the circumstances of a person’s birth, are the key determinants of success. Yet Pew’s own research has demonstrated that it is exceedingly rare for Americans to go from rags to riches, and that more modest movement from the bottom of the economic ladder isn’t common either. In fact, economic mobility is greater in Canada, Denmark, and France than it is in the United States.” Slate

He Beat Her And Murdered Her Son — And She Got 45 Years In Jail – “Lindley’s case exposes what many battered women’s advocates say is a grotesque injustice. As is common in families terrorized by a violent man, there were two victims in the Lindley-Turner home: mother and child. Both Lindley and Titches had suffered beatings for months. But in all but a handful of states, laws allow for one of the victims — the battered mother — to be treated as a perpetrator, guilty not of committing abuse herself but of failing to protect her children from her violent partner.” Buzzfeed

Performance review gender bias: High-achieving women are ‘abrasive’ – “There’s a common perception that women in technology endure personality feedback that their male peers just don’t receive. Words like bossy, abrasive, strident, and aggressive are used to describe women’s behaviors when they lead; words like emotional and irrational describe their behaviors when they object. All of these words show up at least twice in the women’s review text I reviewed, some much more often. Abrasive alone is used 17 times to describe 13 different women. Among these words, only aggressive shows up in men’s reviews at all. It shows up three times, twice with an exhortation to be more of it.” Fortune

Cost of Fighting ISIS: U.S. War Against Islamic State Nears $1 Billion – “Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who spoke alongside Dempsey at Friday’s briefing, gave an estimated daily cost of $7-$10 million dollars, significantly lower than the CSBA numbers. “We’re going to require additional funding from Congress as we go forward,” said Hagel. Currently, the military is relying on money from the budget for Overseas Contingency Operations, often referred to as war funding. The proposed FY 2015 defense budget allocates $58.6 billion for war funding—but 91 percent of that is set aside for residual operations in Afghanistan.” New Republic

The Score: Why Prisons Thrive Even When Budgets Shrink | – “Who says the government can’t do anything anymore? Even as Ronald Reagan argued that “government is the problem” throughout the 1980s, the state imprisoned twice the percentage of Americans previously incarcerated. As Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government” over in the 1990s, incarcerations skyrocketed to almost five times their rate in the 1970s—a rate that had been stable across the twentieth century. How did this happen?” The Nation