Favorite Ozarks Books – 13

Tags

Brooks Blevins, Civil War, history, Ozarks, reconstruction, slavery, war

I’ve written earlier about the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, which was a most welcome addition to my bookshelf. The second volume came out this fall, and I’ve been working through it; I’m happy to say that I like it even better than the first.

Subtitled “The Conflicted Ozarks,” this volume takes us through the history of the Ozarks during the Civil War into the troubled years afterward, ending after the great timber boom of the 1880s. A third volume that will bring us into the modern years is promised.

A particularly illuminating part of this book is its treatment of slavery in the pre-Civil War Ozarks. I grew up hearing the common phrase that slavery in our part of the country “wasn’t that bad” because slaveowners typically owned only one or two slaves, rather than participating in the large-scale plantation system that existed farther south. According to this view, “slaves were treated as part of the family” and were happier with their condition than the unlucky slaves of the Deep Confederacy. Blevins addresses this conception with sensitivity, noting the essential differences between slavery in the Ozarks and other areas of the country, but also pointing out that even small-scale slavery is still slavery, and that slaveowners of the Ozarks, like slaveowners elsewhere, didn’t hesitate to break up slave families through the sale of spouses and children when it suited their economic interest. In fact, because of its intimacy, Ozarks slaveowning could evolve into deep personal animosity and mistreatment, with all the power on one side of the equation.

The book also gives a comprehensive cross-border treatment of the war itself. We tend to hear about the Civil War in the Ozarks from a single-state viewpoint, or even from a narrower one such as the history of the war in a particular region or from the perspective of a unit or campaign; it’s helpful to read about the war in a broader context. Similarly, the diverging paths of Missouri and Arkansas after the war are well described, along with ways in which the two states remained similar.

The first volume of this trilogy was challenged by its scope; covering prehistory, early Native American history, the colonial period, and the years of American rule up to the beginning of the Civil War is a daunting task. This volume, with its much more confined time period, feels tighter and more narratively coherent, and the vast increase in number and type of source material makes itself felt as well, with Blevins bringing in all kinds of material, from official documents to personal letters and diaries. The breadth of research is just a thrill.

Like its predecessor, this book belongs on the shelf of anybody who wants to be a serious student of Ozark history.

 

Old-Fashioned Words

Tags

etymology, history, Jane Hamilton, language, Lera Boroditsky, linguistics, Thad Snow, words

[A longer version of these thoughts was presented September 15 at the Quincy, Ill., Unitarian Church.]

People who hang around me long enough soon discover that I have a mad fondness for obscure, old-fashioned, and out-of-the way words. This is true for many people who love to write, but also true for others as well. There’s a special pleasure in finding a word that’s been lying around for hundreds of years, perhaps, just waiting for you to pick it up and put it in your pocket, like a coin on the sidewalk. A few years ago I picked up “petrichor,” which is the smell of earth after a rain, and ever since then I’ve been hollering out “petrichor” at every opportunity. A new old word is like a gift from the linguistic universe, a way of expressing something that previously seemed inexpressible. It’s a feeling similar to the experience I have whenever I get a new eyeglass prescription. Something that was blurry and indistinct, or perhaps even outside of my awareness, suddenly comes into sharp, precise existence. That’s what happens when you find a good, old, right word. The little dimple between your nose and your upper lip becomes a philtrum. And you’ve got a name for something previously unnamed. And what’s better is when you look up the origin of the word “philtrum,” and learn that it comes from a Greek word that means “love charm,” and now you’ll never look at a philtrum the same way again.

Other old-fashioned words are ones that you know quite well, but just never get the chance to use. Like steed, for example. Who wouldn’t love to be able to use steed now and then? But unless you’re willing to sound a little ridiculous,  the opportunity doesn’t arise, even if you do ride horses. But it’s a good word to have around. Still others are words that we might want to possess just because they’re so aesthetically pleasing. When you’re driving past a cornfield at sunset and see a flock of blackbirds or starlings all moving in unison, as if the entire flock is a single organism controlled by one brain, the word for that phenomenon is murmuration. I’ll probably never get to use murmuration in the wild, but I’m glad to know it’s there. Likewise with sillion, which is the name for the little furrow you make with a plow in preparation for planting seeds.

Old words reflect older ways of thinking, and thus they are a glimpse into history. I am struck by how many of our commonplace expressions and idioms have their origin from either agriculture or seafaring, two occupations that the great majority of Americans today have little or no knowledge of. When we talk about feeling in the doldrums, for example, we’re likely to forget that the Doldrums is an old word for an actual geographical location notorious for its lack of wind, known technically as the intertropical covergence zone. In the age of sail, getting caught in the Doldrums meant an extended period of forced idleness, debilitation, and inactivity that was not only tedious, but could even be fatal if your ship’s food stocks ran out. And who but the most dedicated farmers among us will recall that if you sow your wild oats, you’re likely to get a poor harvest, or none at all, and that you’re better off sowing those boring old tame, domesticated, tried-and-true oats. And what’s so bad about it when your chickens come home to roost? Nothing, it might seem, until you think about it in the original context of the metaphor. The original meaning of the phrase was that whatever you send out into the world will always come back to haunt you. In fact, the original expression was that curses are like chickens, in that they always come home to roost. As we might say today, karma’s gonna get you. So when I see an old-fashioned word, and understand where it came from, I am in a real sense looking back in time.

The other side of this observation is that some old-fashioned words deserve the obscurity they’ve been cast into, for they represent a way of thinking that we have thankfully outgrown. I’ve been reading a book lately called “From Missouri: An American Farmer Looks Back,” by a man named Thad Snow. Thad Snow was a farmer in the Bootheel during the first half of the twentieth century; he bought land near Charleston in 1910 and farmed it for more than forty years. Now Thad Snow was a true radical, one of those classic curmudgeonly Midwestern freethinkers who popped up from time to time during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most famous moment occurred in January 1939, when he partnered with a sharecroppers’ activist named Owen Whitfield to support a widespread sharecroppers’ sit-in across southeast Missouri after many of them had been evicted by their landowners. He was the only major landowner to support the sit-in, and he was branded a traitor to his class by the other large farmers, who fancied themselves to be a plantation aristocracy of sorts. But in his memoir, written in 1954, he repeatedly refers to Owen Whitfield, his colleague in the sit-in, as a “darky.” Even given Snow’s penchant for making provocative remarks, which seems irrestible to him, this use of language that was out of date and offensive – even back then – makes me think less of him, and to reconsider his stance on behalf of the sharecroppers. Maybe he wasn’t acting out of principle, but just out of foolish contrariness. His language reveals more about his thinking than perhaps he had intended.

And that’s where I am headed with my thoughts on old-fashioned words. In linguistics, there’s a famous and rather controversial concept called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it boils down to this: Our language shapes our thinking. In greater detail, the hypothesis makes the case that all languages focus on certain aspects of life, and the difference in those focuses leads to differences in our thinking. It’s a more scientific version of the old “Eskimos have forty words for snow” idea. If we have the words to express an idea, it will get expressed; if we do not have the words, it likely will not. Linguists have studied the many variations in languages around the world, such as languages that do not have “count nouns” (such as one, two, three, and so forth) and languages that use cardinal directions instead of concepts such as left and right. As you might imagine, the speakers of these languages possess some interesting capabilities that English speakers lack, and lack some capabilities that English speakers own without even being aware that they do. To illustrate that point, linguist Lera Boroditsky points out that although speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, an aboriginal language from Western Australia, do not have what we think of as the basic concept of left and right, they do have a remarkably precise sense of orientation to their landscape. Even a small Kuuk Thaayorre child is able to point north-northwest at any moment, while we advanced Americans would need to get out our phones and hope for the best. The inherent limitations and biases of language are the subject of Suzette Haden Elgin’s science fiction novel series Native Tongue. In this dystopian series, set in the 22nd century, women have been stripped of their civil rights, and a group of female linguists create a language for women as an act of resistance. In this language, called Laadan, there are distinctively separate words for a range of female experiences. For example, there’s a word for being pregnant, a separate word for being pregnant for the first time, and another for being pregnant joyfully.

The words we possess shape the thoughts we can express. If we acquire, and habitually use, the language of violence and exclusion, we enable violent and exclusionary thinking. And the opposite is also true: acquiring and using language of appreciation and beauty bends our minds in those directions. Ruth Dahl, the narrator and central character of Jane Hamilton’s wonderful novel The Book of Ruth, tells us how the verbal poverty of her upbringing has affected her:

We were the products of our limited vocabulary: we had no words for savory odors or the colors of the winter sky or the unexpected compulsion to sing. The language I had to speak to be understood is not the language of poetry or clear thinking.

One of the most repeatedly humbling experiences of my life is teaching literature to young people, because a lot of young people are not instinctively inclined toward literature in the way that earlier generations were. They’ve grown up accustomed to other modes of expression, and a lot of school work involves reading for main ideas and essential elements, not the kind of slow, savoring reading that literary study asks. So you have to re-teach them into different reading habits: don’t count the number of pages till the end, but stop and reflect every so often. Instead of reading for the general sense of a passage, read for every last bit of significance. And when you encounter an unfamiliar word, celebrate! It’s a gift. Needless to say, that approach doesn’t always go over in class. But once in a while, a student will pick up the spirit and discover the hidden revelations of old-fashioned words, the ferocious rigor of keelhaul or the sweet promise of bower.

Chain Migration

Tags

chain migration, cultural geography, German, history, immigration, Missouri, Russel Gerlach

I’ve been re-reading Russel Gerlach’s classic study Immigrants in the Ozarks, originally published in 1976 and now out of print. As you might imagine with any 43-year-old work of scholarship, it has some things I would quibble with, but by and large it’s a fine study and the source of some excellent basic information. I was taken aback, though, at his casual use of a phrase that has taken on harsh political connotations in recent years.

He quotes an earlier work, Wilbur Zelinsky’s The Cultural Geography of the United States, published in 1974:

Once a viable ethnic nucleus takes hold in a given location, chain migration may be triggered. If communication lines are kept open between the new settlements and relatives and neighbors back home, positive information may induce the latter to pack up and follow. In this way, a great many . . . rural ethnic neighborhoods have been expanded.

Nowadays, of course, “chain migration” is used almost as a dirty word in the debate over immigration. I didn’t realize that the phrase had such a long history or neutral use. But a moment’s reflection made me realize that I should not have been so surprised. Chain migration, the phenomenon if not the term, has been the American norm. My own family story is one of chain migration. One adventurous son makes the journey; writes back that there’s opportunity to be had; his brother (my great-grandfather) follows; makes a start; writes home; more family members follow. Most of us, if we look back far enough, are chain migrants.

Sometimes even entire communities were the product of chain migration. As you drive the back roads, you’ll see the evidence of this phenomenon in the names of towns and settlements, some now gone, some still flourishing:

Altenburg

Bavaria

Belgique

Dresden

German

Kiel

Krakow

Rhineland

Swiss

Westphalia

Wittenburg

And the list could go on and on (and no, Japan was not named by a group of homesick Japanese settlers!) Everywhere I turn, I see evidence of chain migration’s effects.

 

Streetcar City

Tags

Hers and His STL, history, Kansas City, St. Louis, streetcars, World's Fair

During my research into turn-of-the-century St. Louis, I came across this marvelous blog post about the history of streetcars in the city. Ryan Albritton does a detailed analysis of two maps, one from 1903 and the other from 1940, showing the development (and decline) of St. Louis’ streetcar lines and the impact of those lines on the city’s population. It’s a fascinating account, and I recommend reading it. Here’s the 1903 map:

Albritton observes how the map resembles an anatomy drawing of the circulatory system, with a the heart (downtown) containing a dense network of lines on nearly every block, and an expanding fan of circulation outward into the residential areas. Lines also facilitated travel to cemeteries, parks, and the soon-to-open World’s Fair grounds. Interestingly enough, there were plenty of north-south lines, too; anybody who’s ever tried to go north-to-south in today’s St. Louis knows how difficult that is. Today’s ease of east-to-west and difficulty of north-to-south only exacerbates the city’s racial divide.

The sad history of the demise of America’s city streetcar lines, helped along by General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil as a way of replacing streetcars with buses and thus boosting their profits, is one of the tragedies of the 20th Century. Albritton cites statistics that between 1917 and 1928, streetcars in America carried 12 to 13 billion passengers annually. That’s an amazing number; think of the congestion that would be removed from our cities if such a system were in place today.

And yet this morning, I read an opinion piece in my local paper from a writer out of one of the usual sources (Heritage Foundation), complaining about the inclusion of “wasteful” mass transit funding in the federal highway bill. It’s only wasteful if you think strictly of governmental dollars and cents, not including the private expenditures on cars, gasoline, and related expenses, the growing gridlock and declining livability of our city centers, and the associated social and environmental costs of being locked into a transportation system tilted toward one person in a car, commuting from a distant suburb.

Serendipitously, I also read a fascinating piece in Politico yesterday about the growing success of Seattle’s mass transit system. Let’s hope that Seattle’s experience sparks other cities to re-examine their approaches to mass transit; nobody expects a return to the grid of electric streetcars that dominated transportation in the early 20th Century, of course, but certainly we should be imaginative enough to consider alternatives to the fossil-fuel powered systems that now rule us, and that relegate streetcars to the role of tourist novelties like the Loop Trolley and the KC Streetcar.

Hail the Local Historian

Tags

history, Lesterville, local history, memory

I just finished reading Lesterville Community: The Early Years, an oversized, 413-page book that I can guarantee will never be a best-seller. And that’s fine! Because what’s important about this book, and the many books like it, is that it exists in the first place.

The authors, John Jamison (now deceased), Paul Adams, and Wade Hill, all longtime Lesterville residents and graduates of Lesterville High School in the 1950s, have collected documents, stories, photographs, and memories of all things Lesterville-related up to the mid-20th Century, producing a comprehensive portrait of the community’s early settlers, schools, businesses, churches, and pretty much everything else. If you want to know when the first public school was established in Lesterville or who built the garage on Old Highway 21, this book will tell you.

Local historians – and every community, every county, has them, the stalwarts of the local historical society and the keepers of the obscure artifacts – don’t always get much respect from their professional counterparts, who see them as dabblers or region-specific obsessives, who fail to see bigger trends in their determination to record every name on every plat map and census record. But those local historians serve a valuable purpose. They excel at giving a deep feeling for a place, its essential characteristics and its essential people, and the good ones know how to tell a compelling story.

Local historians preserve the collective memory of a place, in an era when memory seems to be in dangerously short supply. And sometimes they discover important but overlooked stories that escaped mainstream attention for some reason. So celebrate your local historian, and contribute to your local historical society! (And if you’d like to buy a copy of Lesterville Community, contact me and I’ll hook you up.)

Taum Sauk reservoir north of Lesterville, under reconstruction in 2009 after its disastrous breach. Photo by KTrimble at English Wikipedia and used under Creative Commons license.

Christ of the Ozarks

Tags

Arkansas, art, Christ of the Ozarks, Eureka Springs, Gerald L. K. Smith, religion, statues, True Detective

In the final episode of the third season of HBO’s crime drama True Detective, there’s a fleeting overhead shot of a landmark that most Ozarkers would instantly recognize.

By Bobak Ha’Eri – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:09-02-06–ChristofOzarks.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2047158

No, that’s not the image you see, nor the image you’ll see if you drive out to this statue. What you’ll see is this:

from TripAdvisor

Yes, Christ is looking the other way. How’s that for a ready-made metaphor?

The “Christ of the Ozarks” statue sort-of overlooks Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It faces in the direction of Eureka Springs, anyway, although it’s hard to see from most parts of the town. It’s an easy statue to criticize, with its oversized head, weirdly neutral expression, and boxy shape, almost as though it’s actually a radio tower disguised to look like a statue of Jesus. And is that a bosom? But aesthetics are not really that statue’s point, anyway.

Religion has played an enormous part in the cultural story of the Ozarks. Historians identify Baptists and Methodists as the largest of the early denominations, with significant pockets of Catholics and Lutherans in particular areas. In later years, Pentecostal denominations such as the Assemblies of God and others experienced great growth. By the time the “Christ of the Ozarks” was erected in 1966, the area, like the South in general, had been entrenched for more than a hundred years as a bastion of no-nonsense Protestantism. Even today, a new arrival is likely to experience the “have you found a church home yet?” question within minutes in a conversation with neighbors.

The religious influence has been, pardon the phrase, a mixed blessing for the area. On the one hand, the deep-rooted Christianity of many of the people I have known and loved has been a constant example of our better capabilities, our capacity for kindness, love, generosity, and unselfishness. Unfortunately, there’s also the intolerant and judgmental side as well, and sometimes those two components coexist side by side.

When I look at the statue, I see the weird history behind it. The brainchild of far-right radio evangelist and anti-Semite Gerald L. K. Smith, the statue was intended to be the centerpiece of a religious theme park that would include a replica version of Jerusalem, a premise that John Mort plays with in his short story “Take the Man Out and Shoot Him” in his new collection Down Along the Piney. Jerusalem never got built, although the park does have a “Holy Land” tour featuring selected replicas of Biblical scenes, the statue, and a Passion Play. I’ve searched their website and can find no mention of the park’s founder. Just as well – the Ozarks don’t really need a designated memorial to a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer who founded the America First Party, in 1943 no less.

This statue has a triumphalist vibe to it, like some kind of Hittite monument, and quite frankly it gives me the willies. Oversized statuary always makes me question the message of the image. Mount Rushmore comes to mind, of course, with its pantheon of heroes; the nobility of expression on those faces recalls us to the potential of America’s greatness, although I’ve sometimes wondered if their crowding on the mountainside also implies that no one will ever achieve that greatness again (Where would we put him/her?). The massive monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia, likewise, places its figures into a setting of godlike heroism, although the meta-message there seems pretty disturbing.

The choice of immensity is intended to be overpowering, to bear down all doubts and questions. Don’t like this Jesus? Too bad. He’s going to be gazing down at you with that blank and inscrutable expression wherever you go. But the question remains: Why erect a two-million-pound Christ over a region that has been unflinchingly Christian for generations? It’s not as though the people down below need inspiration.

Every theme park needs a landmark, I guess.

from TripAdvisor

 

I Should Really Stay Away from the FSA Archives

Tags

art, Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Farm Services Administration, Great Depression, John Vachon, Ozarks, photography

A recent inquiry, which I will write about later, sent me to the Library of Congress‘ Farm Services Administration digital archive, looking at images. I’ve posted a few before. This is an amazing archive of photographs by some of the greatest photographers in twentieth-century America. It’s truly a bottomless pit for the curious browser. Here are a few that showed up when I searched the archive using “Ozark” as the filter term:

Children of Ozarks Farmer – Missouri, 1940

Ozark Children, 1940

Ozark Farmer and Family, 1940

Ozark Mountain Girls, 1940

William Stamper and Wife, Who Have Lived in the Ozarks for More Than Fifty Years, 1936

Rehabilitation Client at Spinning Wheel, 1935

 

Map Time!

Tags

Current River, economics, history, Jefferson City, lumber, maps, Ozarks, Poplar Bluff, railroads, Van Buren

My affection for old maps goes back a long way, as any of my longtime friends and family can testify. Maps are fuel for the imagination, and I still use historic maps a lot.

I’ve developed a new talk that I’m ready to start giving to libraries and civic groups – it’s about the timber boom in Missouri that began in the late 1880s and continued into the teens, and the cultural and environmental repercussions of that boom. Needless to say, historic maps play a part. The one shown here is an 1877 railroad map of Missouri.

The solid line is the Iron Mountain Railroad, which had only reached as far as Pilot Knob before the war, but had by 1877 been extended all the way into Arkansas. The dotted lines are “projected” railroads; and by “projected” we can go all the way from “overtly planned” to “wishfully imagined.” I re-read Dee Brown’s classic Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow recently, and it was striking in his research how haphazard the railroad expansion was; if a speculator could get enough backers, then a railroad in that area would be built, regardless of need or connection to existing lines. Railroad mania extended to the local level in the form of county governments that would grant all kinds of incentives to railroad companies, including bonds that would burden the counties for decades afterward when the company went bust. David Thelen’s Paths of Resistance describes many instances of counties across the state that gave tremendous financial assistance to sketchy railroad companies, often assisted by liberal amounts of graft, followed by taxpayer revolts in later years as the bond payments came due. Indeed, some of the incidents of courthouse-burning that occurred in the state during the latter part of the 19th century can be attributed to taxpayers trying to wipe out the county’s tax records in a spasm of felonious retribution. (Other instances occurred because of another type of crime-covering, which I will devote a later post to.)

For the purposes of my talk, though, the item of interest on that map is the projected railroad between Van Buren and Poplar Bluff. In 1877, it was an item of fancy, although lines would eventually be built from Williamsville to Van Buren and from Neelyville (not shown on the map) to Doniphan. But the central development in the timber boom was what became known as the Current River Line, which came in from the west, snaking in from Willow Springs to Mountain View to Birch Tree to Van Buren and eventually to a town that didn’t even exist yet, the timber-milling hub of Grandin. That was the line that opened up the southern Ozarks to the timber boom.

I gave this talk at the Missouri River Regional Library in Jefferson City last weekend and was fortunate that Gene Brunk, a longtime forester in Missouri, was in the audience. Gene’s grandfather was a fireman (a boiler-stoker, that is, not a firefighter) at the smaller of the two Grandin mills, and Gene had some wonderful photos and stories to tell.

 

A Good Year in Ozarks Writing – Already

Tags

books, Brooks Blevins, history, literature, Ozarks, Phil Howerton, University of Arkansas Press, University of Illinois Press

2019 has barely begun, and I can already tell that it’s going to be a banner year for writing about the Ozarks.

I’ve been working my way through the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, entitled The Old Ozarks, and it’s a grand piece of work. Richly sourced, comprehensive, and adroitly written, it is the history we’ve all been waiting for. I’m eagerly waiting for the second and third volumes to appear so I can snatch them up, too. If you are interested in the Ozarks, or interested in history, you must get this book – or at least make sure your library has a copy.

And then next month, another landmark book will hit the shelves: The Literature of the Ozarks, a comprehensive anthology edited by Phil Howerton of Missouri State – West Plains. It’s been a long time since anyone attempted an Ozarks literary anthology, and I can’t remember if anyone has ever put together one of this magnitude, stretching from the early 19th century to the present day. It’s being published by the University of Arkansas Press, and although I haven’t seen a physical copy yet, I’ve seen the table of contents, and it’s magnificent. I say this with a blush, since a selection from one of my books is included. I’m thrilled to be among the company.

Two days into the new year, and already a memorable one. I’m eager to see what other reading treats await.

Modern-Day Debtor’s Prison

Tags

criminal justice, debt, Missouri, poverty, prison, taxes

Tony Messenger has been running a mesmerizing series of columns in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the criminal justice system in rural Missouri. The latest column appeared on Friday, and they are all worth careful reading. [UPDATE: Messenger won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for his reporting.]

The columns document how counties and judicial circuits around the state have turned their criminal justice systems into revenue-generating operations. A number of mechanisms have arisen to do this: Imposing high and ever-escalating court costs for probationers, requiring costly drug tests run by a private company, and incredibly enough, charging prisoners rent for the time they spend in jail.

The cumulative effect of all these tactics is that poor people — who are, of course, disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system — are serving as a new revenue stream for cash-strapped counties across the state. A dumb kid who messes up and runs afoul of the law gets pulled into “the system,” as it is so rightly called, and instead of simply serving his 30 days or whatever and putting the offense behind him, becomes a never-ending source of income for his county.

 

One can’t entirely blame the counties for this situation. Their tax bases are uncertain, especially in areas of the state with declining population (and thus sales taxes). They can’t keep raising property taxes, and in many cases have been finagled into giving property tax abatements to some of their biggest propertyholders by the promise of jobs in the future. (Boone County, where I live, has done that several times over the past few years, abating property taxes for companies that promise to locate in the county and bring new jobs.) So they look anywhere they can to make up the shortfall. Unfortunately, private companies that promise a fee for “services” like probation monitoring, drug testing, jail phone management, and the like offer a temptation that counties find hard to resist. And the disenfranchised end up bearing the cost. The subject of the most recent Messenger article is now homeless on the streets of Kansas City, not because he failed to complete his jail sentence, but because he couldn’t keep up with the mounting court costs that accumulated as a result.

We like to imagine debtor’s prisons as a long-ago horror from a novel by Dickens. Unfortunately, we seem to have re-created them in a new, corporatized, form. Any time you mix the workings of the criminal justice system and the profit motive, you are asking for abuse.