Art Project!

So, perhaps it's a stretch to call this an art project. I certainly don't consider myself an artist, and in fact the specifics of this project required nearly no artistic skill at all. But I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of people who might mistake it for art, so we'll run with that.

I've taken on several cosmetic projects for my bedroom. During the summer I bought a primed (but unpainted) dresser at a yard sale. I painted it a nice bold blue. More recently I got rid of the old pulls (they were the flappy kind you often see on old furniture); since the screw holes were at such an odd spacing anyway -- 2.25" when the modern standard is 3" -- I ended up just filling those holes, sanding them down, re-painting, and putting on new knobs that I like a lot better. I also sanded, primed, painted, and gave a new knob to an old nightstand that was starting to look a little sad from years of use. Between these, the paint job, and the curtains I felt like the room was really putting together a coherent color scheme.



(Note that despite how it appears in this picture, the wall color is uniform.)

Unfortunately, after looking at it a few too many times, two problems became evident: first, the walls were completely and conspicuously naked; second, the purples were too far away from the blues. I don't even know if that's a real thing, but it was certainly bothering me.



The obvious solution was to track down some art for the wall to bridge the gap and flesh out the color palette of the room. I spent some time on Etsy, eBay, and Craigslist trying to find something to fill the gap. Nothing really was quite what I wanted and everything seemed very expensive. I eventually just about settled on a woman out east somewhere who did mini-paintings, near-monocolored in any color you want, with all sorts of visible brush strokes to make things a little more interesting.

I decided that the nonuniformity was the part of her work I liked the least, given that everything else in the room is very much one flat color. After some sifting around on art supply websites it also became pretty clear that I would be able to produce similar work for much cheaper than buying it.

So I bough some canvas -- twenty six-inch squares -- and I picked out some paint samples at Menards. A few four-square-foot samples was plenty to do what I wanted.



The actual painting was time consuming but certainly not difficult. One color at a time, I laid out a few canvases and painted them each with a few coats of flat uniform color. I also put a layer of clear protective spray coating on them; it was something that artists on Etsy played up and the spray itself (certainly not intended for this purpose) was quite inexpensive.



The most frustrating part was hanging. My initial instinct was to drill a few shallow holes in the back of each canvas's frame and stick those on nails. It turns out that's very time consuming and has a lot of failure points. Eventually I realized that the better solution was just to put a pair of nails in the wall for each canvas (for those counting at home, that's forty nails I now have in the wall over my bed) and set the inner edge of the frame on them. The difference in the thickness of the frame is certainly no larger than my uncertainty in putting in the nails. Because I'm impatient I hung the squares as I went (though in the pictures I think that makes it easier to see what's going on).



They aren't arranged in any particular pattern, other than having one of each of my four colors in each column.



You can judge for yourself, but I feel very good about how this turned out. It seems to me that the room makes more sense now.

Punishment and Rehabilitation

Just as two wrongs don't make a right, the idea that criminals must be "brought to justice" through punishment is primitive and even harmful. When we step back from our emotions it's obvious that a rehabilitated criminal is better for society than a punished one. Furthermore, statistics show pretty clearly that those two are not the same thing; two thirds of those released from prison commit another crime within three years and half are back in prison in that same time.

It seems to me that after a crime is committed there are two most important actions: reversing (if possible) the damage done, and using knowledge from that crime to prevent future crimes. Punishment of a wrongdoer may bring emotional closure to the wronged, but if this punishment doesn't actually reduce crime then we need to look for another solution.

And it doesn't -- the United States keeps a higher fraction of its population in prison than any other country on earth. With 5% of the global population we have something like 25% of the inmates. Far more than half of inmates are nonviolent offenders, largely due to mandatory minimum sentencing. But compared to other developed nations the United States has similar overall crime rates.

If a crime is committed for economic reasons -- to feed a family perhaps -- then it's a symptom of a fixable problem. In fact, it ought to be fixable for much less than the cost of punishment. Keeping one person in prison for a year costs the country something like $40,000. You can buy for a lot of community college or job training for that much money. Obviously making training opportunities available as a response to someone committing a crime is awkward positive reinforcement but a proactive approach seems very practical: reduce crime by reducing poverty by investing in social programs that create skilled workers.

Saving the money on prison is great. But it seems reasonable to expect that putting breadwinners to work instead of in prison might decrease the dependence on welfare programs as well.


More extreme than prison time is the death penalty. It is impractical to say the least, and yet another way that the United States is more like a developing country than a wealthy one; the practice is banned in Canada, Australia, and almost all of Europe. Nobody has been executed in South America in the last decade and Africa is moving away from the practice as well. For the most part, capital punishment exists here, in China, in India, and in the Middle East.

Implementing the death penalty gambles that a prisoner will never be exonerated. Furthermore it implies that the prisoner can never be rehabilitated. There is no matter of the rehabilitation being too costly; the cost of implementing the death penalty is comparable to -- and perhaps more expensive than -- the cost of a life sentence without parole. As this paper puts it, "We try to maintain the apparatus of state killing and another apparatus [the preceding legal deliberations] that almost guarantees that it won't happen. The public pays for both sides."

There is significant disagreement as to whether the death penalty is an effective deterrent for crime, and near-consensus that it is an ineffective use of law enforcement funds.

Of course, not all crime is committed out of economic desperation. In fact, there is debate as to the causal relationship between poverty and crime (though it's certainly true that there is a correlation -- the states with the highest poverty rate/lowest average income also tend to exhibit high crime rates). Certainly an example of non-economic crime could be the recent shootings in Aurora, Oak Creek, and the many others that routinely make it into the news. Dealing with criminals who have non-obvious motives is more complicated.

It's possible that some individuals are highly predisposed to violent outbursts from birth. If so, even if you had a way to screen them as children, what action would be appropriate before these people have done anything wrong? Similarly, abuse during formative years can lead to acting out violently (for example, see here). Can a person damaged far in the past be rehabilitated effectively?

How do you prevent crime by those who aren't getting the help they need for psychological or emotional issues? How do you handle them afterwards?

If crime is lucrative (for example, dealing drugs), how do you combat it? Marijuana is something I'll talk about in an upcoming post but I'll have to do a lot of reading before I have anything intelligent to say about harder drugs.

And there's likely something to be said for the gun culture we exhibit in this country. We have close to thirty gun homicides per day in the United States, which is close to triple the highest per capita rate you see in any European country. We also have the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, double that of Switzerland at number two. It seems likely that there are systematic and cultural issues at play.

Unfortunately, not only are these issues nebulous, they're probably interrelated. It's a mess.

We can quickly look at Norway's system for comparison, as it draws sharp contrasts to ours. In Norway the maximum prison sentence is 21 years, though it can be extended if the individual is deemed to still be dangerous. Their prisons are notably nicer than ours, in some cases being compared to resorts. There is no capital punishment. Their crime rate is low; per capita our murder rate is about eight times larger than theirs. In Norway there is only a 20% rate of returning to prison within two years of release; in the United States that number is closer to a 50%.

What a socialist hellhole!