Author: Joshua Miller

  • The 2016 Election at JCI by Roger Caplan

    Teaching a class, “The 2016 Presidential Election: The Fight to Vote in American History,” in the JCI Scholars Program presented me with a unique opportunity to view the recent election through the eyes of a forgotten voting block – the incarcerated. The experience was a rich and rewarding one. Students were well prepared for class and demonstrated a deep understanding of the candidates and issues. They had strong opinions and did not hesitate to voice them, all the while adhering to the agreed upon guidelines that discussions be conducted respectfully and supported with facts.

    To put the 2016 election into perspective, we read Whistlestop, in which author John Dickerson writes about some of the more colorful presidential campaigns of the past. In discussing the book, the class concluded the Clinton-Trump contest we witnessed this year was without precedent. Like most of us, the students did not anticipate a Trump victory, however they were able to identify some of the key reasons for his victory.

    The class expressed particular interest in the purpose of the Electoral College. They had a spirited discussion on the pros and cons of deciding the presidency based on the vote of the Electoral College versus the popular vote.

    What impressed me most was the students’ willingness to ask questions. They were not hesitant to ask for clarification or confirm the accuracy of information when they were confused about an issue or something the candidates said. I feel confident they have the interest and the skills to be well-informed voters upon their release.

  • Douglas Scott Arey (September 26, 1948 – March 27, 2016)

    Douglas Scott Arey (September 26, 1948 – March 27, 2016)

    A memorial service for Douglas Scott Arey (September 26, 1948 – March 27, 2016) will be held on April 7, 2016 at 10:00 a.m.

    Here is the location:

    St. Barnabas’ Episcopal Church
    5203 St. Barnabas Road
    Temple Hills, MD  20748

     

  • New Partnership with the University of Baltimore

    New Partnership with the University of Baltimore

    UB_Logo_H_BLUETwo months ago, the Attorney General Lorretta Lynch and the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan came to Jessup to announce a plan to offer Pell Grants to some prisoners again. They gave us until October 2nd to find a university partner to offer credit-bearing programs.

    I’m very pleased to announce that the University of Baltimore has applied to the Department of Education to offer degrees at Jessup Correctional Institution: a BA in Community Studies and Civic Engagement, and a BA in Human Services Administration, starting in Fall of 2016. We hope to enroll a cohort of 20-30 students, starting with eligible members of the JCI Prison Scholars Program!

    There’s a lot of work to be done between now and next September, and it’s still possible that the Department of Education might refuse UB’s application. But I am bursting with pride in our students at Jessup for making this possible. At the University of Baltimore, it is our own Andrea Cantora who led the effort and will be shepherding the credit-bearing courses into being. Dr. Cantora came to us with plenty of experience working in prisons, but in her criminal justice courses she saw students who are deeply curious and hard-working taking classes without credit or recognition, and so she’s put an immense amount of time and effort into giving them what they deserve!

  • Renaissanz Rzen: Artist in Exile

    Renaissanz Rzen: Artist in Exile

    1This show will feature the work of artist Warren Hynson, who works under the name Renaissanz Rzen. Hynson has spent more than 20 years in prison and is currently incarcerated in the Jessup Correctional Institution. He began painting after being inspired by the work of his fellow prison artists. His vibrant acrylic portraits of inmates help tell the story of his own struggle and the struggles of his comrades in exile.

    Rosenberg Gallery, 2nd Floor of the Brown Center
    Maryland Institute College of Art
    Wednesday, October 1-Tuesday, October 14
    Reception: Friday, October 3, 7 pm
    • Gallery talk by muralist, painter and outsider art authority Dr. Bob Hieronimus
    • refreshments provided
  • Game Theory and Design

    Go Board
    “Go” by Flickr user Bauke Karel

    This semester we decided to do something a bit differently. First, we decided to experiment with team teaching; it’s difficult to team teach in a university because labor requirements are usually expressed in terms of teaching load, and so there’s no good way to give credit for teaching half a class. Plus, my co-instructor, Daniel Levine, doesn’t even teach at the same institution. So we decided to team teach two classes, with him taking the lead in our course on Violence, and me taking the lead in our course in our second departure from standard coursework: a class on Games.

    The idea for the Games course, (officially Game Theory and Design) was to meld traditional games and decision theory work with actual games, and to build up to the point where the students designed their own games or created a module for games that allow that. So we started with the standard decision theories, discussed payoff matrices and various simple games, following the standard line that goes from one-off games like the prisoner’s dilemma and chicken game (we used nuclear disarmament examples) to iterated games. We also threw in a smattering of probability theory, because we wanted them to be thinking about mixed games of chance and skill fairly quickly.

    The games we played at the start were interesting but difficult: we mapped the strategies for tic-tac-toe and then introduced the game Go. The big challenges were that not everyone was getting a chance to play the games outside of class; various limitations on students access to the school (holidays, snow days, etc.) kept getting in the way. We even introduced them to Diplomacy, a fascinating semi-cooperative game that becomes quite cut-throat in the final rounds.

    In developing this course, I have a couple of ulterior motives: I wanted to make sure we worked through Eleanor Ostrom’s institutional analysis and design account of rules, norms, and strategies. I find this work (and Christina Bicchieri’s “grammar of society”) quite useful for giving nuanced game theoretic accounts of thing we don’t think of as games, including things like nuclear arms races and disarmament where we seem not to be wholly motivated by competitive impulses. Forbidden Island gave the students a taste of how one might design a game that is both challenging and wholly cooperative; and this, in turn, suggests that the rules themselves might have a lot to do with the competitive element in our lives and society.

    Another of the big departures from a standard game theory course as it might be taught in an economics department was our desire to play lots of games, and a transition we are beginning to make into non-standard games that focus on storytelling and role-playing. The stereotypical example of such games is Dungeons and Dragons (and we last week we introduced a free clone of the original D&D called Labyrinth Lord.) But our goal is to transcend the standard fare pretty quickly and move into games that are less about dice and probabilities and more about storytelling. A great example of this is the game Fiasco; a story-telling game that gives each player an opportunity to create and act out a role in a Cohen brothers film, “ordinary people with powerful ambition and poor impulse control.” This is a game almost wholly divorced from victory and defeat. Defeat is guaranteed, really: the goal is to tell a great story along the way. Designing “playsets” or scenarios for Fiasco is one of my dream goals for the students: these merely set the stage for others to imagine their own tragicomic stories.

    One big impediment is that while the prison allows prisoners to own Xboxes and playing cards, they do not allow dice. The fear is that the dice might be used for gambling, I believe. So we have to constantly develop techniques for introducing the unexpected and random into our games. This has already led to some interesting experiments and techniques. (Why don’t people gamble on Rock-Paper-Scissors, anyway?)

    Anyway, thanks for the support! I’ll have more to say about the course next month as we see how new games strike the fancies of our students!