Author Archives: wendywelch

Meanwhile, Back in the Bookstore….

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tea_for_twoAccording to social media, the world is cracking down the middle, and “The World” means America. According to commercial media, a lot of dumb mean people elected a president. I’m not sure what “the people” are saying because I can’t find them behind the memes and the blaming and shaming.

Okay, so everybody’s mad at everybody, got it. Time to do a bookstore tidy. It’s small, but when everything outside is falling apart, at least I can manage a little cozy order  inside.

So I put the kettle on (okay okay, I opened a bottle of red wine) and started in. Good grief. In general fiction, Robert McCammon sat astride a Jamica Kincaid novel. She belongs in classics, he belongs in the nuthouse – well, horror. Lots of nasty werewolves involved in strange situations.

Over in history, I found a telenovel of The Tudors. No, no, no. The Tudors, smirking, went back to historic fiction. But sitting in brazen glory on that shelf was Hadley, our, ehm, special staff cat. Hadley lost a few brain cells during an oxygen-deprived birth, and, as we say in Big Stone, “She ain’t right.”

Hadley was playing a game with the Robert Harris alternate future novels – and what were they doing in historic fiction in the first place? She pushed the top one off the sideways shelf stack, waited until it tumbled to the floor some four feet below, and then pushed the next one.

“Look Mommy, I’se helping!” Well, yes, they needed to be moved anyway.

And so it went. William Johnstone mounted his palomino and rode back to westerns from (in order of appearance) classics, mystery, paranormal romance, and Christian non-fiction. The Patricia Cornwells got rounded up and returned to clearance. I’m pretty sure one of them bit me.

And Carl Hiassen migrated from every corner to occupy the H shelf in fiction.

We culled some books, too. Sidney Sheldon, your time has come–and gone, and come, and gone. Hasta la vista, baby. We need the space for science fiction.

Outside, the world feels cold. There is no place for anything – not dissent, not agreement. Building a bridge has become sleeping with the enemy. Refusing to play along is derided as sore losing. We are literally in a place with no place for dialogue.

Outside. Inside, the bookstore continues to be itself: a not-too-tidy place where people of dissenting needs and plans are welcome. Where conversations will be civil and accompanied by tea, and where “everyone welcome” doesn’t have a hidden caveat. Where ideology and practicality and reality lie in messy alliance next to one another, and nobody can impose much order on them, nor tries. There will be other places like this in other parts of the country, pushing up green things between the concrete cracks. God bless the cracks.

How did holding still come to look like moving in the wrong direction? I dunno, but the shelves are tidy and the future looks messy and we have the kettle on.

We also have whisky. Y’all come.

Keep Calm and – – -?

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Jack is doing the Monday book this week –

Crime Control as Industry – Nils Christie

Regular readers of this blog will probably know that I visit inmates at our local Federal prison each month, and I’ve been doing that for over four years. It’s against that background and in that context that I’m reviewing this book – – –

One thing I had inevitably learned in my conversations with inmates was that there seemed to be an enormous economy surrounding prisons in the US, then research showed me there was a very disproportionately high number of African-American prisoners, and the overall percentage of the population behind bars in this country was among the highest in the world (the three highest are China, Russia and the US).

Christie’s book is mainly concerned with western European countries and the US, and focuses on the very different attitudes and approaches to crime and punishment in them.

Nils Christie is a Norwegian criminologist, and his world-view is naturally affected by where he is based and grew up. The first thing that caught my attention in this book was that (at the time it was written – 1998) there was a waiting list in Norway for folk to serve their prison sentences! The number of prisons was small and there was a consensus that people shouldn’t be crammed in, so folk carried on with their lives and waited to be told when there was a space for them. The sentences were fairly short in most cases and only the most serious actually received prison time at all. Despite this, crime figures were low compared to other countries.

What on earth was going on here?!

What Christie goes on to unravel is the very definition of crime, the need for ruling elites to create and then control a ‘surplus population’ and the market led industry that operates that control. At its crudest (which is always), the market needs a level of unemployment in order to suppress wages and allow the economy to compete with others around the world (this is exactly the thinking of the recent winner of a certain Presidential election). That ‘surplus population’ in the US has historically been mainly black, so there are residual racist reasons feeding into the equation as well.

So, where are we now?

Christie is/was tentatively optimistic that reason would prevail and that his Norwegian model would set an example, however, other more recent research suggests otherwise. The growth of private prisons, the economic market surrounding State, Federal and private prisons, the increase in the ‘surplus population’ and the demonization of anyone who isn’t a WASP.

Maybe the fact that I’m a WASP and can write this is a good sign? There again, maybe an algorithm has already identified me as part of the ‘surplus population’?