How do we Turn Symptoms into Words?

 Rachel Aviv, "How do we Turn Symptoms into Words?", New York Times, October 16, 2022, pSR4-5.

Ms. Gaines-Young ended up incarcerated for a crime she committed when she was psychotic, and she became close with a prison librarian with whom she discussed the books she was reading each week. She felt grounded by a deep connection to another person, and when she was sick, she trusted the librarian's assessment of her state of mind.  When, after going off psychotic drugs, the librarian told her, "I don't fully recognize you," Ms. Gaines-Young decided to start taking medications again.  "She knew me intellectually, philosophically, and even on some level spiritually," she said.  "She was a huge barometer to judge my wellness and non-wellness. Ms. Gaines-Young went on "She wasn't treating me like a problem to be fixed only with medication.  She understood the language I was speaking."

COMMENT

The non-judgmental practice of librarianship becomes a helpful approach for a woman with mental health problems.  The connection is established by talking about books and ideas, not focusing on a medical diagnosis. 

Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison

 Emily Bazelon, "Can You Please Help Me Get Out of Prison?", New York Times Magazine, July 4, 2021, pp 27-33, 47, 49.

It started with an email I received from a retired librarian in Oregon  "Dear Ms Bazelon, Karen Oehler write in July 2019.  "I correspond with an inmate, Yutico Briley, at Dixon," a prison in Jackson, La.  For a couple of years, Oehler and Briley had been writing to each other through a support program for incarcerated people. 

...

Briley mentioned that one of his favorite books was "Exodus,' the 1950's novel by Leon Uris about the founding of the state of Israel, which he borrowed from the prison library cart.  I remembered the paperback copy I checked out from the library when I was growing up.  "One of my faviore things to read about is history," he wrote,. "The book I read is old, and the pages crch when you flip them."

...

I went to law school and passed the bar, but I've never practiced law.  I decided, though I had never intervened like this before, to call a few innocence lawyers on Briley's behalf.  I wasn't sure why -- he was one prisoner among millions.  Was it because I wasn't really planning on writing about him?  Because Briley saw himself in the young men in my book?  Because he mentioned the novel "Exodus"?  I didn't know.  But hen that's often true of relationships and of stories.  One spark catches.  Maybe others follow

COMMENT

What a great library story!  Yes, there are lawyers involved, but Briley's innocence wouldn't have been  established without libraries --first, because of a retired librarian who is still involved in social justice work, and secondly, by his choice of reading that happened to establish a bond with Bazelon.  At age 19, Briley was sentenced to 60 years without possibility of parole.   He spent eight and a half years in prison before a new D.A. was elected in New Orleans who campaigned on a promise to re-examine wrongful convictions.

Woman in the Woods

 

Sandra Steingraber, "Woman in the Woods, Orion Summer 2021, pp. 54-63.

She finds in the woods a fully intact 2.5-acre deer exclosure constructed by Civilian Conservation Corps workers in 1937.  There are sapling and understory pine trees growing inside the fence.  In the biological station library, she finds a cache of old species inventories that researchers and students conducted within and around the enclosure with data going back over several decades.  She learns the techniques of dendrochronology and reconstructs the history of the forest the forest thought tree ring analysis.
....

Off to the right, a truck with an official state license plate drives away down a rutted lane.  It seems that the park naturalist, cleaning out his office at the end of the season, unearthed some correspondence from years past and thought the grad student from Michigan might find something of interest, so he threw the boxes n the back of the pickup and drove them over to her campsite.
...

There is a small library cart of paperbacks.  Only one book per cell.  [Washtenaw County Jail]....
There is ransacking and chaos.  All around the women, bedding , books, letters, bars of soap, pencils, toothbrushes fly though the air.  Who has it?  Who has the blue makeup?  No makeup is ever found, But tucked inside the pages of a library book in the cart one of the men in blue gloves finds the shard of a mirror.  The library cart is removed.  No more books. Everybody back in their cells. Clean up the mess. 

COMMENT

A PhD student finds that The Park library has one version of landscape history; the hidden correspondence contains an entirely different and far more frightening story revealing that the study are was a testing area for Agent Orange and that ecological data was falsified in order to promote use of the herbicide. 

Steingraber becomes a reporter for the student newspaper.  She is singled out for police harassment, apparently for writing editorials against military testing,  and ends up spending 12 days in jail.  In jail  the guards again misuse authority as a tactic of intimidation.  As a punishment for having (or not having) forbidden makeup, the library books are taken away. 

The jail cell is described as a "bookless room" -- the suppression of information whether through secrecy or violence is a crime against humanity.