Ernest Drucker sent along this paper along with this story:

I [Drucker] have been speaking about the problem of mass imprisonment for years to anyone who would listen – mostly professional groups and students. Once I spoke to the Urban League national convention in Pittsburgh – to little response. But one such talk was to the medical students at Einstein where I teach – they had organized a social medicine course outside the formal curriculum and I was happy to see their interest went beyond clinical medicine. My topic was the epidemiology of incarceration. I showed all my usual PPT slides – tables of data showing the sharp rise in imprisonment in the USA over the last 30 years- and of how far imprisonment had spread in the black community. I talked about the epidemic and our countries drug war policies – something I’ve done dozens of times.

But in the audience was Dean S who came up to me after the presentation and asked if Id be willing to give the same talk to her group of students – who it turned out were all in High school in the Bronx. They were in the Einstein program to bring Bronx HS kids into the medical school labs and hospitals – to let them see about medical science and maybe interest them in careers in health in some way. As select HS students many would go to college, so maybe it was a bit of early recruiting of local talent for Einstein admission in 4 or 5 years. They came from most of the public and parochial high school of the Bronx, but these kids were the pick of the crop. To be in the program they had to sign up in advance fore limited number of slots, they had to get up there to Einstein every week for a term, and their parents were supposed to come in too- for a conference with Dean S about their progress. These were serious kids from families that support their academic goals ands valued education enough to go to some extra trouble to cultivate it.

As I often do with audiences, I asked who had ever had a family member or close friend go to prison. To my amazement they all raised their hands – 100% of them had a member who had been in prison – that’s a very simple and striking measure of the prevalence of incarceration at this time in the Bronx – every family in this select group was affected directly by incarceration.

We’ll be talking with Ernie this Thursday in the social networks working group. His work seems related to the ideas of this paper (or at least to its title).