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soviet weather
Thursday, April 19 2012
Gretchen works for a program that puts a liberal arts college program inside a number of prisons. Given the punitive, suspicious, and entrenched nature of the prison system, hers is not an easy program to help operate. Over the years the individuals of a prison administration come and go like clouds across a sky, each bringing with them their own "weather" of either authoritarian crackdown or, mercifully, a slight relaxation towards relative openess and tolerance (glasnost, if you will; terms once used to describe political weather in the old Soviet Union seem apt when describing that which happens in America's own gulag archipelago).
Sometimes this "soviet weather" changes not because of a change in administrative personnel, but because of a specific incident. Some prisoner is found doing something naughty and new draconian rules are imposed to make sure it never happens again. For example, years ago a prisoner was found operating his drug operation from his cell using a, well, cellphone. At the time prison authorities (who, after all, are not specifically hired for their imaginations) probably hadn't imagined what cellphones might allow prisoner populations to do, but after this incident, the crackdown on cellphones was absolute; nobody was allowed to bring cellphones into the prison, not even as far as the front desk. Any violations of this policy were greeted with the kind of zero tolerance that has made modern public schooling so Brezhnevian; in other words, employees were fired without being warned.
A couple months ago an incident occurred where a prisoner went missing within the prison for a certain amount of time. He was eventually found and hadn't, in fact, hatched a daring escape using bedsheets and paperclips. But the overreaction was swift. After looking over any possible vulnerabilities in the paperwork permitting prisoners to move from one activity to another, it was determined that certain semi-trusted prisoners (so-called "clerks") would no longer be allowed to perform the tedious busywork of drafting "call-out sheets," which allow prisoners to come to the part of the prison where the various classrooms are. That work would henceforth have to be done by civilians such as, well, Gretchen. Producing those call-out sheets now takes up hours of her time every week, and, because there is no second set of eyes, her work tends to contain more errors than it had when it was done by prisoners. Sometimes after she gets home from work I can hear Gretchen yelling obscenities at her computer because Dropbox isn't updating a file or some feature of Excel has been mysteriously greyed-out.
Of course there has to be a better way. I'm a database developer, and I tend to have OCD about inefficiencies related to human interactions with data. So today I had Gretchen walk me through all the things she has to do to produce the weekly call-out sheets. It involved multi-worksheet Excel files passed around between administrators using Dropbox. When prisoner data changes, it has to be updated in multiple places and then reordered by cell number. Ultimately it all gets exported to a PDF file. Looking at this system, I saw that it wouldn't take much work for me to build a web interface that could automate away all the drudgery and automatically export those PDFs. I would use PHP and MySQL to do these things, but there's already an existing student and class database created with Filemaker.
This evening Gretchen and I watched Young Adult, the latest Charlize Theron vehicle. Usually a story arc depends on a change that happens to a character, but in this case the arc depended on the clash between a severely unchanging character (played by Theron) and the people of her hometown (which, unlike her, have grown up). Theron is so connected to her inner bitchy-teenage-popular-girl that she uses that voice to write a semi-popular series of young adult novel. But she also can't fully process that her old high school sweetheart has grown up, married, and had kids. Young Adult works as an engaging and often surprising psychological thriller. It's not quite Hitchcockian, but there's definitely some menace lurking beneath its surface.
By the way, just after Young Adult's cold open, Gretchen and I were both delighted by the many close-ups views of the inner-workings of an automotive tape deck. Those intricate dancing clockworks are sadly nowhere to be found in a modern music making machines.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?120419 feedback
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