The Nerd Parade, Live@WREK!

Last night, Graham cola_fan had informed me that The Nerd Parade was going to play Live@WREK, so I popped over to the student center with Graham and Rob poodleface and we grooved to the groovy tunes. Our cohort John tricil plays guitar and laptop, and the whole situation rocks out pretty hard, even if their songs and sound are not particularly nerdy. You might recall The Nerd Parade from their appearance at the Happy Nophi Year show... and their live performance on the radio is available here for the next week!

(mostly unrelated: Dharmatronix is still doing his thang! We saw him (among others) at Eyedrum, years ago, and he did a really wild thumpy-glitchy remix of Luda's "Southern Hospitality".)

How will we save the world?

We will save the world like this: The Bard Prison Initiative has volunteers from Bard College going into prisons in New York to bring the learning to the inmates. This sounds like the exact right thing to do, for humanitarian reasons as well as the simple economic!

Prisons are tremendously expensive, and there's a very strong correlation with being locked up and being functionally illiterate. Apparently as a nation, we used to have more educational programs available in prisons, but these have been cut in recent decades. The study from the BPI suggests that supporting education in prisons reduces recidivism, saving taxpayers from keeping prisoners locked up later on -- it's apparently twice as cost-effective to spend the money on education. In this program, those incarcerated can work towards a GED, vocational training, or once qualified, a college degree, but they're only able to provide slots for a few dozen prisoners, and hundreds want to get in. So right now, they only admit about 15 new students each year -- the demand is huge, but the supply is very low, and admissions are competitive. Maybe the supply could be made a bit bigger...

Executive summary from their report:

This report illustrates the overwhelming consensus among public officials that postsecondary education is the most successful and cost-effective method of preventing crime. The United States Government should resume its long-standing policy of releasing a fraction of Pell Grants to qualified incarcerated Americans. As proven by the government studies cited in this memo, its impact was enormously positive. Resuming this policy would slash rates of recidivism and save the states millions of dollars. Note. The data cited in this memo comes exclusively from official publications produced by or for the United States Government and the governments of the states.

- article from the NYT by Ian Burma, instructor from Bard
- Prison Parchment: article about the graduation ceremony and history of BPI
- A Dozen Amazing College Students: from Mark Schmitt (another instructor who's taught at BPI)