Three Steps To Help Returning Citizens Gain Second Chances Through STEM

BY EDEN BADERTSCHER AND BASIA SKUDRZYK

As we observe Second Chance Month, which recognizes the formerly incarcerated, this April, it’s time our country finally charted a new course for justice-impacted citizens returning to society.

Everyone deserves a second chance, and the groundwork must be laid long before people leave prison. All people who are incarcerated need meaningful career learning, mental stimulation and strong support services to fully reintegrate into society. Yet, far too few prisons provide these necessities, and far too few returning citizens are prepared to thrive post-incarceration.

Today, the U.S. system of incarceration actively prevents returning citizens from contributing value to our society. This is not the problem of a few: The Prison Policy Initiative reports that almost 2 million people are incarcerated in the U.S. Recent studies report that 1 in 2 U.S. adults have a justice-impacted loved one, and “nearly 4 percent of U.S. children younger than age 18 are separated from a parent because of incarceration.” By stigmatizing justice-impacted parents and removing opportunity, incarceration denies children promising futures.

But we can change this. One way of doing so is a strong system of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education in prisons.

With our colleagues at Education Development Center (EDC), Prison-to-Professionals and other partners, we build pathways to STEM careers in prisons through the STEM Opportunities in Prison Settings (STEM-OPS) initiative. These pathways are vital for both returning citizens and our country’s STEM economy. Currently, the U.S. has a critical STEM workforce shortage. The STEM industry tries to address its growing workforce needs, but people who are, or have been, incarcerated are largely overlooked.

For people in prison, high-quality STEM education provides a direct route to productive and stable livelihoods, as well as a pivotal way to contribute to societal and national well-being. Providing educational opportunities in prison, including STEM education, saves significant taxpayer money (education is 4 to 5 times more cost-effective than incarceration) while providing a respected way forward for justice-impacted people: A true second chance.

In our STEM-OPS network, we have many successful STEM professionals who began their careers in prison — because they had access to STEM education. Unfortunately, they are in the minority. To expand STEM opportunities to all, here are three steps, as part of a more comprehensive strategy: 

1, Get rid of false narratives about STEM ability:

There is a false belief that people in prison cannot succeed in STEM. Such biases pre-exclude untapped talent from participating in and contributing to STEM progress. If we create prison-to-STEM career pathways, justice-impacted people can contribute to STEM — supporting their families, communities and country. And STEM fields urgently need returning citizens, as lack of diversity is impeding national progress. Diverse lived experiences yield divergent thinking key to innovation. Opening up a new stream of talent into STEM fields will enable the workforce to use different lenses to view complex problems, ask different questions, pursue unique approaches and see solutions that would escape a less diverse STEM workforce. By excluding any population, we diminish what we can achieve. By seeking out those who have direct lived experience with our myriad societal and ecological problems, including incarceration, a truly diverse STEM workforce can produce creative solutions for rapid economic growth and stability.

 
2. Make the technology in prison equitable with that on college campuses:

We must ensure equitable access to information and communication technology in prisons, as states prepare to implement the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act. The act focuses on advancing “digital equity among populations most impacted by the digital divide,” the very populations who are overrepresented in prison. A new study found that 92 percent of jobs require digital skills, that having such skills improves the economy and “states that target resources toward digital skill building could generate measurable monetary benefits.” The majority of justice-impacted people can only access antiquated technology and are not prepared for the 92 percent of jobs that require technology skills post-release. It’s key to tap the Digital Equity Act to provide justice-impacted people with the digital access and training they need to succeed in the workforce.

 
3. Expand the Chips and Science Act workforce development funding to prisons: 

The Chips and Science Act has highlighted the U.S. struggle to stay competitive as a global STEM leader. The worldwide chip shortage cost the U.S. an estimated $240 billion in 2021. For our country to remain competitive in the worldwide STEM economy, we cannot afford to under-educate anyone, nor discourage STEM interest. Yet amid plans to support STEM learning ecosystems to advance Chips and Science Act goals, prisons are being overlooked. Across the nation, our prisons could and should be essential parts of STEM learning ecosystems. Chips and Science Act funding has a tremendous potential to increase STEM education opportunities and prepare returning citizens to “make more in the United States” and help revitalize their communities.

We can make a strong, successful second chance a reality for all returning citizens. These citizens are our sons, our daughters, our parents and our friends. They are future innovators and solvers of our nation’s challenges. 

Robust STEM education and careers present a vital way forward for them — and for our nation. We can start this April, we can start today.

-------------------THE HILL

Does Israel Have A Moral Obligation To Welcome African Refugees?

African asylum seekers and human rights activists protest against deportation in front of the Rwandan Embassy in Herzliya, on January 22, 2018. Image: Tomer Neuberg/Flash-90

BY SIMONA WEINGLASS

Speaking at Bar Ilan, renowned leftist, Zionist political theorist Michael Walzer advocates greater openness to migration, calls Israel’s turn right scary, draws ire from some

On the American Left, renowned political philosopher Michael Walzer holds old-fashioned views. He is a Zionist when many younger leftists question the legitimacy of a Jewish state, a believer in military humanitarian intervention abroad when much of the left is anti-militarist and anti-imperialist, and an opponent of the BDS movement to boycott Israel — although he has supported a targeted boycott of settlement products.

On June 13, Walzer, 84, who is a professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, delivered the M.G. Levin Annual Public Lecture in Jewish Thought at Bar-Ilan University.

During the lecture, he argued, on moral and Jewish ethical grounds, that Israel ought to take in more non-Jewish refugees and that it should not deport Israeli-born children of foreign workers. Walzer also spoke separately with The Times of Israel about what it is like to be a leftist and Zionist in the age of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Walzer told the audience that he is by no means an advocate of open borders but that he believes that the United States, and Israel too, should be taking in more refugees than they do today.

Walzer pointed out, by way of example, how amazingly generous the United States has been toward newcomers.

The original settlers of what became the United States were English and Scottish, he said, but “in the course of the 19th century these settlers, with considerable reluctance and sporadic resistance, allowed themselves to become a minority in what they thought was their country.”

He contrasted this American openness with statements by a Polish politician who recently objected to letting in several thousand Syrians “because he said he didn’t want the Poles to become a minority in Poland.”

Walzer called this a “nasty” argument, although he understands, in principle, the desire of nations to preserve their culture.

“People have a right to be at home in their homeland, where they have created a language, shared a history, shaped a landscape and established a calendar with holidays and ceremonies. They have a right to hope that their grandchildren will grow up in that place, nourished by its traditions.”

But Walzer argued that good homelands have the capacity to absorb and integrate a limited number of immigrants.

“This should be a matter of pride. We can make large numbers of foreigners into home folks. The French, for example, did exactly that over much of the 20th century.”

Walzer argued that states have an obligation to take in three types of immigrants: ethnic and ideological kin, asylum seekers fleeing political persecution, and refugees fleeing war or natural disasters. This issue will become pertinent in the coming decades, he said, as tens of millions of desperate climate refugees are expected to migrate en masse to more hospitable parts of the earth.

“You also have a question about how you treat the people you’ve already taken in, he added. “This morning there was an article in Ha’aretz about 100 Filipino mothers who are about to be deported with their children who were born in Israel. These are children whose first language is Hebrew, who grew up here. And I think it would be an indecent act and a dishonor to the state of Israel to deport these people.”

Many of the audience members strongly disagreed with Walzer and the decorous lecture was followed by a heated question and answer session. One attendee walked out of the lecture hall in anger over remarks he considered to be too right-wing.

“I think you understate the challenges for nation states by saying to bring a small number of people,” one questioner said. “Look at what’s happening in Europe where these immigrant groups have dramatically disparate reproductive family and growth rates. And a lot of these groups have no interest whatsoever in integration into the absorbing culture. Some of them are antagonistic to it.”

Another man said that African migrants to Israel had high crime rates, something which can be experienced if you live in south Tel Aviv, he said.

Another suggested that African migrants to Israel are not in fact refugees: “You haven’t addressed the question of economic migrants and certainly the people that came from Africa initially may have been proper refugees, political refugees fleeing oppression, but what it grew into was a pipeline for people from poor countries to migrate to rich countries. It’s happening in the United States as well. There are actually organizations that facilitate migration. These aren’t refugees.”
The Left and Zionism at odds

On the sidelines of the lecture, the Times of Israel asked Walzer whether he has experienced anti-Semitism on the American left.

“There is a problem but I think in the United States it is much less serious than in Europe, especially in Britain,” he said. “I lectured on this subject at the Begin Center two nights ago and someone from Britain pointed out that in Britain it is criticism of the state of Israel and opposition to the existence of the state of Israel that opened the way for anti-Semitism.”

“It wasn’t the other way around. We think that anti-Semitism produces anti-Zionism but he was arguing that anti-Zionism in, say, the Labour Party made anti-Semitism legitimate.”

Walzer said he doesn’t see the same pattern in the United States and that, in fact, a great deal of anti-Zionism in the United States begins with young Jews.

“Some of them are diaspora nationalists and what they believe is that Jews are too good for statehood. When you have a state, you have to be brutal, you have to be murderous at times, and that’s for the goyim. We are better than that. After two thousand years of statelessness, we have become a cosmopolitan people that has transcended the nation state.”

Walzer said this diaspora nationalist viewpoint was an “important current in American Jewish life.”

In addition, many young Jews in the United States fiercely oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank as well as its current right-wing government, he noted.

“And then they get caught up in the BDS movement, whose leaders and ideologues are really committed to the elimination of the Jewish state. But a lot of the supporters of BDS are not. They don’t have that commitment. They think this is just a campaign against the occupation.”

Walzer argued that those leftists who say that there shouldn’t be a Jewish state but who are on record supporting every other national movement in the world probably deserve the label of anti-Semitic.

Walzer said he is a member of a group of liberal and leftist professors who fight the BDS movement on campuses and in professional associations.

“What we have discovered is that we can win battles on many campuses and in the professional associations if we push for the widest possible vote. The key example is the Association of Anthropologists, which for years has been identified as hostile to Israel. Every year at their annual convention they hold a business meeting that votes for a BDS resolution. This year some of the people in our organization insisted on a vote of the whole organization’s membership.”

The result, he said, was two-to-one against BDS.

Asked how many younger leftists there are who aren’t opposed to Zionism or nationalism, he replied, “There are young people who have my politics and there are young people who would have my politics if Israel hadn’t become so unattractive to them.”

“I think of myself as liberal in three different ways. There is liberal democracy, which means democracy with constraints on what majorities can do. I’m a liberal nationalist, which means that I believe in self-determination and the importance of statehood for all nations including other nations besides the Jews. And I am a liberal socialist. I believe that socialism has to be accompanied by liberal democracy. It can’t be a vanguardist politics. So liberalism is the adjective that describes the substantive positions that I hold.”

Walzer assesses that Israel still has substantial support in the Democratic party.

“On the left fringe of the Democratic party there begins to be an open critique of Israel which sometimes takes anti-Zionist forms. But sometimes it is explicitly two states and against the occupation. And that’s still the majority position.”
‘An old Mapainik’

Turning to Israeli politics, Walzer, who visits this country at least once a year, described himself as the “equivalent of an old Mapainik.”

“My friends here are mostly my age and they are also old Mapainiks [forerunner of Labor Party], and some of them are old Mapamniks [socialist Zionists].

“For them, and for me, the rightward turn in Israel’s politics is scary because this is not the old right. This is not even the right of Jabotinsky and Begin, because they were in some sense English liberals.”

Walzer said that Haredim, who used to be apolitical, have become a force that bolsters and enhances aggressive nationalist trends “that are hostile to any version of multiculturalism, that are hostile to non-Jews and that support a politics that claims to have religious reasons for wanting the whole [land of Israel].”

Likewise, the secular nationalism of the old Likud has been transformed, said Walzer.

“It seems to have become, in ways I don’t fully understand — and maybe it has a lot to do with Bibi Netanyahu — corrupt and increasingly extreme. It has become a kind of populist nationalism.”

He defined populism as the revolt of democracy against liberalism.

“It’s an argument that once there are majorities, the majorities can do anything they want. They shouldn’t be restrained by courts or by human rights legislation.”

“So that’s a politics that we see in eastern Europe in India. And it’s a very dangerous politics. What exactly are its sources? I suspect there are different sources in different countries. But there is a kind of fellow feeling, a kind of alliance. Bibi goes to Hungary and finds and gets the support of people in Hungary who are anti-Semites but who are very pro-Israel as long as Israel is in the hands of people like themselves.”

Walzer added “Hungary may be well on the way to a neo-fascist kind of politics. In Poland there’s still a very strong opposition. And I don’t give up on the United States.”

As for Israel, he said, “I certainly won’t give up on Israel. I think it’s very important to remember that Israel is a 70-year-old democracy. There aren’t all that many countries that have sustained a democratic regime for 70 years. So there must be some kind of popular commitment and institutional organization that sustains it. I really believe that there are very strong forces in Israel, not only on the left but well into the center and even the center-right, who will not allow the destruction of Israeli democracy.”

SOURCE: TIMES OF ISRAEL

Keep Moving On

Here they come again. According to a Vanguard Report, the nation's National Think Tank "has selected 56 prominent Nigerians" to review a constitution that has long been overdue considering the fact that the said constitution was enacted in a hurry, having not much effect to the population; thus a fabricated document by a military machinery.

First, the brouhaha became part of a big deal when the Fourth Republic came into being with calls for a Sovereign National Conference. That idea died a natural death because it had no base and the callers for such projects weren't serious about the whole issue. How long has the country gone through the mandate of reviewing the constitution from the first initiative? Well, after the idea was killed by a sitting president, the tune changed as it favored the callers who did not feel threatened as it was in the past when they thought the nation was slipping away from their hands.

Now that Professor Steve Azaiki has disclosed the gathering of a constitutional review committee and PRONACO as its blood bank, would there be another call for a sovereign national conference whereby indicated that the entire nation would have a sense of purpose in which a sovereign national conference would be the main focus of the constitution review committee? The National Think Tank made it clear where it will be getting all of its materials for reviewing the constitution. They include National Political Reform Conference, Presidential Technical Committee, National Assembly Joint Committee on Constitution Reform and the National Conference which has been PRONACO's doing from day 1.

We've seen all these before and hopefully if it becomes just blowing another hot air, there will be no other choice than to be moving on. Whatever it is, I think the constitution of 1999 should be entirely rewritten which should include people from all walks of life from around which the nation has been shaped. That would make sense, or else, we should keep moving on.

Whatever happened to that call for a Sovereign National Conference? Did the callers change their minds or they perhaps want to keep moving on? Time will tell.