Margaret Atwood: People are very conflicted about what prisons are for. Are they to punish people and make them have the most horrible awful life possible? Or are they to open up other chances for them or possibly a combo? Now we would all agree that some people really need to be in there because they are a danger to other people. If running around outside and quite frequently a danger to themselves it's also quite true that some of them probably don't belong in prisons at all, they belong in institutions that would do something about their mental challenges that they're having.
Prison systems in Hag-Seed, which is a revisit in Prospero's novel form of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, it's kind of inevitable that you would be writing about prisons because there are so many of them in the play. So revisiting the play involves writing about imprisonment, coercion of various kinds. And everybody in that play is in prison, constrained, unfree in some way for some part of the play except possibly Miranda who although she's on an island she can't get off of doesn't know anything better so doesn't feel that she's imprisoned. I might point out that on this island there's no butter. They toted up the things they had to eat and they were fairly limited so you can see why Prospero might want to get back to Malan his hometown simply to have something better to eat, but that's an aside.
So I did look at prisons and I was involved earlier in a protest in Canada against the closing of prison farms where people had been learning to interact with and care for beings other than themselves, namely animals, which can be very therapeutic. Over the years prisons have gone through many forms. Were they to put your political enemies in so you could ransom them later? Were they to put criminals in in order to punish them? Were they debtor's prisons where you oddly put people in who couldn't pay their debts thus making it impossible for them to pay the debts? Their relatives would usually have to bail them out if they had any relatives. Then in the 19th century, a very reforming age, we got the idea that prisons should be improving, that people should be improved by them that they should learn skills that would be useful to them later on instead of prisons that got called penitentiaries and then some of them got called reformatories so you're going to reform people.
And in 19th century prison systems in North America, which I read a bit quite a lot to write my novel Alias Grace, which concerns a famous real life murder case, they talk illiterate people to read and write so that they could read the Bible. So they were very instructional in that way. Where we are now is we don't know. And it doesn't make sense to talk about the prison system. So which prison where? How does it see itself? What is it being used for? And who is sent there? I was at Bard College a little while ago and they do run a college degree system in an adjacent prison. And you can get your degree and in fact a couple of people graduated at that time because I was there for graduation. And as for teaching Shakespeare in prisons, that has gone on more than you might think.
There's a very good book called Shakespeare Saved My Life, which is about a female college professor who went into a maximum security all male prison and taught Shakespeare. She had to sit in isle to do it. And the people learning were in these little cubicles, but she said that she got better papers from them than she got from her college students because those people had been there and done that. They had assassinated Duncan. Those were the kinds of crimes they were in for. So they were able to speak from personal experience about Shakespeare's accuracy in portraying the emotions, you know how you feel. Is this a dagger that I see before me? Apparently you do except these days it's a gun. So that kind of thing. There is a book by an Italian man who did teach The Tempest in a prison. Found it transformative for the people in it. They actually put it on. And when he came out he wrote this book about it and is now currently building out the program of putting on Shakespeare in prisons. It has been done. And if it hadn't been done I wouldn't have been able to write in the book the way I did because I didn't want it to be completely implausible, you know, something in it that would never happened.
It has happened and it does happen. And from what I hear about it it should happen more because a lot of the people who are in prison are in there because they have not had the advantage of an educational system, they have not been able to learn usable skills and skills that they can actually get a job with and therefore they have drifted, not all of them but a lot of them they get absorbed into these other ways of making money.
The other thing that literacy and literature do, particularly what we call literary fiction or plays like Shakespeare's, you learn empathy because you learn what it is like to be another person. You learn what it was like to feel the emotions of another person. And if you've been in a very constricted sort of life in which your main idea has been just to keep yourself alive and keep going you often just don't think of what you're doing to other people and how they might feel.
In Margaret Atwood’s new novel Hag-Seed, the protagonist Felix loses his job as a theatre director and is exiled to teach in a prison. Exiled? You betcha. Atwood’s latest work is a re-telling of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
This is how Atwood has come to know these two seemingly at-odds subjects so intimately and, in this video, shows us where such strange bedfellows intersect.
First she asks the most fundamental question: what are prisons for? Are they to inflict punishment for wrongdoing? To teach a lesson? To keep the public safe? To correct someone who has walked dangerously off course? Each era in history has had its own motive, and in the 19th-century the emphasis turned to reform. "We got the idea that prisons should be improving," says Atwood, "that people should be improved by them; that they should learn skills that would be useful to them later on. Instead of prisons, they got called penitentiaries, and then some of them got called reformatories."
Reform got off to a good start, but the U.S. has drastically lost its way. The systems purpose is confused. Data collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2005 to 2010 show that within three years of release, 67.8% of released prisoners were rearrested. The incarceration climate is clearly not conducive to a fresh start. Until more seismic shifts are made at a systemic level, there is one thing that can help prisoners – or rather one man: William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare's works have been taught in prisons, and some of it is well documented, for example the memoir Shakespeare Saved My Life, by Laura Bates, a college professor who went to a maximum security, all-male prison to teach the inmates stories by the Bard. Bates found that they related to the plays deeply, and the papers she got from them were better than the ones she got from her college students. Why? Because those men had lived Shakespeare’s brutal plot lines. Revenge, murder, sick bargains, madness, maiming: it spoke to them on a level many of us may (fortunately) never fully appreciate.
These stories also have a transformative effect on prisoners' empathy, because literary fiction has the power to firmly move you into someone else’s shoes. "If you've been in a very constricted sort of life in which your main idea has been just to keep yourself alive and keep going you often just don't think of what you're doing to other people and how they might feel," Atwood says. Shakespeare speaks to the incarcerated, and humanizes them in a way the prison system fails to.
Margaret Atwood's new book is Hag-Seed.
We're learning more new things about death everyday. Much has been said and theorized about the great divide between life and the Great Beyond. While everyone and every culture has their own philosophies and unique ideas on the subject, we're beginning to learn a lot of new scientific facts about the deceased corporeal form.
An Australian scientist has found that human bodies move for more than a year after being pronounced dead. These findings could have implications for fields as diverse as pathology to criminology.
Dead bodies keep moving
Credit: Flickr
Researcher Alyson Wilson studied and photographed the movements of corpses over a 17 month timeframe. She recently told Agence France Presse about the shocking details of her discovery.
Reportedly, she and her team focused a camera for 17 months at the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research (AFTER), taking images of a corpse every 30 minutes during the day. For the entire 17 month duration, the corpse continually moved.
"What we found was that the arms were significantly moving, so that arms that started off down beside the body ended up out to the side of the body," Wilson said.
The researchers mostly expected some kind of movement during the very early stages of decomposition, but Wilson further explained that their continual movement completely surprised the team:
"We think the movements relate to the process of decomposition, as the body mummifies and the ligaments dry out."
During one of the studies, arms that had been next to the body eventually ended up akimbo on their side.
The team's subject was one of the bodies stored at the "body farm," which sits on the outskirts of Sydney. (Wilson took a flight every month to check in on the cadaver.)
Her findings were recently published in the journal, Forensic Science International: Synergy.Implications of the study
The researchers believe that understanding these after death movements and decomposition rate could help better estimate the time of death. Police for example could benefit from this as they'd be able to give a timeframe to missing persons and link that up with an unidentified corpse. According to the team:
"Understanding decomposition rates for a human donor in the Australian environment is important for police, forensic anthropologists, and pathologists for the estimation of PMI to assist with the identification of unknown victims, as well as the investigation of criminal activity."
While scientists haven't found any evidence of necromancy. . . the discovery remains a curious new understanding about what happens with the body after we die.
The bristle worm, also known as polychaetes, has been around for an estimated 500 million years. Scientists believe that the super-resilient species has survived five mass extinctions, and there are some 10,000 species of them.
Be glad if you haven't encountered a bristle worm. Getting stung by one is an extremely itchy affair, as people who own saltwater aquariums can tell you after they've accidentally touched a bristle worm that hitchhiked into a tank aboard a live rock.
Bristle worms are typically one to six inches long when found in a tank, but capable of growing up to 24 inches long. All polychaetes have a segmented body, with each segment possessing a pair of legs, or parapodia, with tiny bristles. ("Polychaeate" is Greek for "much hair.") The parapodia and its bristles can shoot outward to snag prey, which is then transferred to a bristle worm's eversible mouth.
The jaws of one bristle worm — Platynereis dumerilii — are super-tough, virtually unbreakable. It turns out, according to a new study from researchers at the Technical University of Vienna, this strength is due to metal atoms.
Metals, not minerals
Fireworm, a type of bristle wormCredit: prilfish / Flickr
This is pretty unusual. The study's senior author Christian Hellmich explains: "The materials that vertebrates are made of are well researched. Bones, for example, are very hierarchically structured: There are organic and mineral parts, tiny structures are combined to form larger structures, which in turn form even larger structures."
The bristle worm jaw, by contrast, replaces the minerals from which other creatures' bones are built with atoms of magnesium and zinc arranged in a super-strong structure. It's this structure that is key. "On its own," he says, "the fact that there are metal atoms in the bristle worm jaw does not explain its excellent material properties."
Just deformable enough
Credit: by-studio / Adobe Stock
What makes conventional metal so strong is not just its atoms but the interactions between the atoms and the ways in which they slide against each other. The sliding allows for a small amount of elastoplastic deformation when pressure is applied, endowing metals with just enough malleability not to break, crack, or shatter.
Co-author Florian Raible of Max Perutz Labs surmises, "The construction principle that has made bristle worm jaws so successful apparently originated about 500 million years ago."
Raible explains, "The metal ions are incorporated directly into the protein chains and then ensure that different protein chains are held together." This leads to the creation of three-dimensional shapes the bristle worm can pack together into a structure that's just malleable enough to withstand a significant amount of force.
"It is precisely this combination," says the study's lead author Luis Zelaya-Lainez, "of high strength and deformability that is normally characteristic of metals.
So the bristle worm jaw is both metal-like and yet not. As Zelaya-Lainez puts it, "Here we are dealing with a completely different material, but interestingly, the metal atoms still provide strength and deformability there, just like in a piece of metal."
Observing the creation of a metal-like material from biological processes is a bit of a surprise and may suggest new approaches to materials development. "Biology could serve as inspiration here," says Hellmich, "for completely new kinds of materials. Perhaps it is even possible to produce high-performance materials in a biological way — much more efficiently and environmentally friendly than we manage today."
