Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 245

What’s Next for the Zika Virus?

Public-health officials in Latin American and Caribbean countries are warning their citizens against pregnancy amid rising fears that the Zika virus, which may be linked to a rise in birth defects, is spreading through the region.

The worry about Zika comes from a suggested link between the virus and microcephaly, a birth defect where babies are born with smaller-than-normal heads and incomplete brain development. While it has not been proven that Zika causes microcephaly, the CDC found the virus in the tissue of four Brazilian infants with the birth defect.

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Zika is mosquito-borne and historically found in Southeast Asia and Africa. The first case in Brazil was reported in May 2015, and the virus has since spread around the region. Health officials in Brazil saw 20 times more cases of microcephaly in 2015 compared to 2014.

Countries across the affected region are coming up with various ways to protect against the virus. In El Salvador, which has seen around 5,000 cases of Zika, officials are urging women not to get pregnant until 2018. Critics of the strategy worry about pregnancies that are unplanned.

Jamaica, Colombia, and Ecuador have also recommended that their citizens delay pregnancy. In Colombia, the suggested delay is currently six to eight months. Colombian officials raised their estimate for suspected cases on Tuesday, saying more than 16,000 people in the country have the virus. More than 1,000 of them are pregnant women, according to the AP.

Brazil, the country worst hit so far, has reported more than 1 million cases. The Brazilian government has sent soldiers “door to door” to destroy places where mosquitoes could breed. The New York Times reported Wednesday that Brazil plans to deploy 220,000 troops for a single day next month to raise awareness about the virus.

In the U.S., several cases of Zika have been reported in Florida, Illinois, Arkansas, Texas, Hawaii, California, and Virginia. In Hawaii, a woman who spent part of her pregnancy in Brazil recently gave birth to a baby with microcephaly. While all cases in the U.S. so far are among people who were traveling and thus likely infected while abroad, the WHO has warned the virus could spread north.

The CDC issued travel alerts for Mexico, Puerto Rico, and countries in the Caribbean and Central and South America, urging travelers to take extra precaution against mosquitos while in the area. The most recent countries to join that list are the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic, the AP reported Tuesday. The agency also recommended that pregnant women avoid all travel to a current total of 22 countries in the region.

The virus, which is transmitted through the bite of infected mosquitos of the Aedes genus, was first identified in humans in 1952. Until recently, there was little cause for concern, because the symptoms of the virus are mild, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO advises that Zika “requires no specific treatment,” and says there is also no vaccine for the virus.

Cleveland Cop Michael Brelo: Acquitted but Fired

If you’re a police officer in Cleveland, killing unarmed civilians in a hail of bullets may not get you convicted—but it might get you fired.

On Tuesday, the city of Cleveland announced it will dismiss six officers who were involved in the November 2012 shooting of Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell. After officers mistook the sound of the car backfiring for a gunshot, they pursued the pair on a high-speed chase through the streets of Forest City, before firing 137 shots over less than 20 seconds, killing both occupants of the car.

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Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty charged one of the officers, Michael Brelo, with two counts of voluntary manslaughter. Brelo, 31, had stood on the hood of Williams and Russell’s car and fired 15 shots at close range into the windshield of the car, after the other officers stopped firing. But in May 2015, a jury acquitted Brelo, reasoning in part that they could not determine who fired the fatal shots. As Matt Schiavenza reported at the time, Clevelanders, especially African Americans, were furious about the outcome.

Although Brelo won’t face criminal sanctions, the city is now moving to fire him and five other officers in the case. In practical terms, the city has to initiate termination proceedings, and can’t immediately fire them. Mayor Frank Jackson said on Tuesday that he expected that appeals would drag the process out for years. Several other officers will face suspensions. Cleveland officials said it took so long to reach this point because the case was unusual. “This incident is unprecedented," said Commander James Chura. "It took an investigation just as unprecedented to get to the truth." (As David Jaros explained last year, however, police discipline tends to be conducted with a meticulousness often missing elsewhere in the criminal-justice system.) Brelo had been suspended without pay.

The Northeast Ohio Media Group has more details:

Eighteen of the 46 supervisors on duty that night were involved in the pursuit. Of them, 12 received administrative charges. One was terminated, two were demoted and nine were suspended anywhere from three to 30 days.

Of the 277 officers on duty, 105 were involved in the chase. Seventy-four were brought up on administrative charges, with 63 being suspended anywhere from one to 10 days. Seven received non-disciplinary letters, one received a written reprimand and three officers had their administrative charges dismissed.

Three days after the verdict in the Brelo trial, the city of Cleveland reached an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice to reform its police department, after an investigation found a pattern of excessive force—including in the November 2012 incident.

McGinty’s failure to convict Brelo would prove to be an augur of things to come. Almost exactly two years after Williams and Russell’s deaths, Officer Timothy Loehmann shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice. In December 2015, McGinty made the surprise announcement that a grand jury had opted not to indict Loehmann or his partner, Frank Garmback, in the shooting. The news was a fresh outrage to many people who had seen the Rice case as one of the purest examples of inexcusable police violence to crop up over the last two years. Critics accuse McGinty of being at best bad at his job and at worst lenient on police killings.

Without the aid of the criminal-justice system, firings seem to be the only way to achieve even a partial and belated response to the November 2012 shootings—an incident that no Cleveland official is willing to defend. Timothy Loehmann, meanwhile, remains on the force, serving on desk duty.

How William 'Refrigerator' Perry Changed Betting Forever

On this day 30 years ago, the Chicago Bears were en route to a thorough thrashing of the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX when William Perry, the 325-pound defensive tackle affectionately known as “The Fridge,” was called onto the field.

In the third quarter, Perry, who had previously been used as a decoy in the game, lined up as a fullback near the goal line. This time, Chicago quarterback Jim McMahon handed him the ball. The rest is legend. Perry crushed his way through the defense and scored an historic touchdown.

“That one registered 3.8,” shouted NBC broadcaster Dick Enberg, referencing the Richter scale.

Among the game’s nearly 50 million viewers were a small coterie of celebrants who had actually bet ahead of time that Perry, who occasionally moonlighted for offensive purposes, would score in the game.

As David McIntire chronicled in SBNation in 2013, some of them made real money:

As [Chicago coach Mike] Ditka publicly down-played Perry’s role, the odds soared to as high as 75 to 1, potentially earning bettors $750 in winnings for every ten dollars bet on Perry to score. Then the national media picked up the story, relishing another colorful hook associated with a team that had created their own music video mid-season. As the publicity flowed in to Las Vegas, so did money. By kick-off the odds dropped to 2 to 1.

And so the “prop bet” (or proposition bet) was truly born, enabling gamblers, casual or serious, to wager on all kinds of aspects of the game beyond the outcome.

The germ of the idea is largely credited to Sonny Reizner, the legendary Vegas bookmaker, who in the sweep of the “Dallas” furor of the early 1980s tried to book bets on who actually shot J.R. on the popular soap opera. He was ultimately forced to refund all the bets, but the gambit was widely mentioned in his 2002 obituaries. Just a few years later, Perry’s Super Bowl rumble opened the door for the dream of whimsical betting to flourish into a multi-million dollar venture.

With the line-up for Super Bowl 50 now set and the game less than two weeks away, a new slate of possibilities will soon open up.

“The props always draw good action,” MGM Resorts sports book director Jay Rood told The Las Vegas Review-Journal. “We're trying to come up with some new ones, and we're even going to put some props up at halftime on the fly.”

Some curiosities that will likely emerge as prop bets: How long will it take for the national anthem to be sung? What color Gatorade will be dumped over the winning coach? How many times will Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning shout “Omaha” during the game?

Unsurprisingly, whether the pre-game coin toss will yield heads or tails always draws even odds. Prior to last year’s game, the previous 48 Super Bowl coin flips delivered an even count of heads and tails with 24 each. Last year, the Seattle Seahawks won it when the coin landed on tails—so be sure to use your head.

A Person Can't Be ‘Diverse’

Ava DuVernay, the director of Selma, is one of the most visible and vocal advocates for diversity in the film industry. She does not, however, love being described quite that way. “We’re hearing a lot about diversity,” she said at Sundance, as reported by The New York Times. “I hate that word so, so much.”

Her rationale is that it’s a “medicinal word that has no emotional resonance, and this is a really emotional issue … It’s emotional for artists who are women and people of color to have less value placed on our worldview.” She prefers that the issue be talked about using terms like “inclusion” or “belonging.”

This isn’t the first time scorn’s been thrown at the word “diversity” from supporters of the ideal it’s meant to represent. In a Times magazine column last year, the journalist Anna Holmes argued that the term had lost much of its meaning. “In reality—which is to say, when applied to actual people, not flora, fauna, or financial securities—the notion of diversity feels more fraught, positioning one group (white, male Americans) as the default, and everyone else as the Other,” Holmes wrote. Among the people she quoted was DuVernay, who previewed the comments she’d later make at Sundance: “‘Diversity’ is like, ‘Ugh, I have to do diversity.’ I recognize and celebrate what it is, but that word, to me, is a disconnect.”

These complaints are all, on some level, about something ineffable. They refer to a feeling—the feeling that a term that once stood for an important and radical idea has become an empty buzzword, or even a deceitful one. You can see the evidence to back up this impression in a related and subtly unsettling linguistic trend toward using “diverse” to describe individuals.

In the press release announcing changes in response to the outcry over the fact that all 20 Oscar-nominated actors were white for the second year in a row, the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences said that its board was committed to “doubling the number of women and diverse members of the Academy by 2020.” Doubling the number of diverse members. The Academy didn’t say in that sentence that it wanted its membership to be more diverse. It said it wanted a higher number of diverse members. Which implies that a sole human can be “diverse.”

Here, by contrast, is the Merriam-Webster definition of the word: “different from each other,” or “made up of people or things that are different from each other.” But to have an “each other” you need to have multiple people or things. You need to have a group.

From the context of the press release and the ongoing debate it referenced, the Academy appeared to mean “people of color” when it said “diverse members.” Women, another underrepresented group who the Oscars want to include, were already mentioned in the sentence. Political viewpoints, socioeconomic status, sexuality, and other identity markers have not been major parts of the conversation around this topic this year and have not been mentioned in follow-up explanations from the Academy. “People of color” have, though.

There’s something inherently depersonalizing about calling a person “diverse.” Holmes’s article cited another instance that puts a fine point on this: “We have two new partners who are so diverse I have a challenge pronouncing their names,” joked the venture capitalist John Doerr at a talk where he was to discuss, yes, diversity. He quickly apologized.

And earlier this month, CBS said it would shoot a Nancy Drew TV show whose heroine would differ from the past popular image of Drew in a crucial way. “She is diverse, that is the way she is written,” president Glenn Geller told The Hollywood Reporter. “[She will] not [be] Caucasian … I’d be open to any ethnicity.”

The three examples above are all from people or institutions attempting to increase diversity (or, if you prefer, inclusivity or belonging). But they are also pretty clear examples of how diversity—a means, an outcome—can erase the very distinctions that makes it necessary in the first place.

You could argue that this is simply how language works. We don’t have a great, simple word to use to indicate “not a white guy”; if everyone is coming to understand “diverse” as a convenient way to mean that, why complain? But the truth is that not everyone is coming to understand that, and it’s not clear that everyone should. Sometimes the problem for which “diversity” is a solution involves gender and race and sexuality and socioeconomic status and any number of additional distinctions; other times, it’s only one of those things.

How, then, to refer to people of color and women? How about … as “people of color and women”?

There was an example of this confusion just yesterday. Variety ran an interview with Kristen Stewart where she talked about the need for women to take action to increase their own representation in the film industry. But the publication sold that interview with language saying Stewart was discussing “diversity.” Social media users blasted Stewart, a white woman, for seeming to blame racial minorities for their own oppression. That wasn’t really what she was doing at all, and Variety issued a correction. “Diversity,” used as a catchall, caught the wrong meaning.

There’s also a linguistic-logic problem here. If one black woman is a “diverse person,” is a group made up 100 percent of black women automatically a “diverse group”? By the more commonly understood use of the word, it’s not one.

How, then, to refer to people of color and women? How about … as “people of color and women”? If you’re talking about other categories—LGBT people, certain age cohorts, nationalities—name them. Or there are other terms that, while perhaps not super-catchy, can work. “Underrepresented populations” is one.

DuVernay’s objection to “diversity” seems to refer in part to the same conceptual weirdness that leads some people to describe individuals as “diverse.” The terminology usually accompanies an attempt to meet a goal deemed socially desirable at the moment—without actually naming the specific sort of people in need of that goal being met. Racial inequality is a real thing with a real history. Gender inequality is a different one. So it goes, down the list of marginalized groups. Many such inequalities may have some common causes and common solutions, but seeing all non-straight-white-males as one undifferentiated mass is not, traditionally, a tendency of those who want an inclusive society where historic injustices have been remedied. It is a tendency of those who don’t.

Shutting France Down Over Uber

Traffic in a number of French cities slowed to a crawl Tuesday as taxi drivers across the country protested against Uber and other “non-traditional” car services.

Dispatches from around France included reports of burning tires, the setting of roadblocks on major thoroughfares, and a campaign for cab drivers to “drive slow.”

#Paris #EU #Taxis demo early hours @viano93 @w14taxi @UniteCabSection @The_LCDC @TheLTDA @UnitedCabbies

The Triumph of Soap-Box Comedy

Whitney Cummings’s new HBO special, I’m Your Girlfriend, is very funny, except when it is not. Performed and recorded at Santa Monica’s Broad Stage, the set contains the stuff you’d expect of Cummings’s comedy: discussions of sex, and relationships, and porn, all of them inflected with an almost aggressive amount of raunch. Cummings jokes about how the language of sex has become more violent of late. She talks about the how the power dynamics of dating have changed now that she is, often, wealthier than the guys she goes out with.

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Less predictable, though, is the fact that Cummings, in her set, actually uses the phrase “power dynamics.” That she begins some of her observations with introductions like “my theory is.” That she begins some others with “here’s my point.”

I’m Your Girlfriend is comedy, definitely (and if the lols it induces aren’t enough, its set—black stage, black background, the whole thing outfitted with a single, standing mic—makes that clear). It’s comedy, however, that is more than comedy alone. It’s comedy that is intent on making a political point. It’s comedy with a moral purpose. To the extent that I’m Your Girlfriend, for all its jokes about porn, ends up scanning, at times, more like a sermon. Or a lecture. Or a TED Talk.

In this, I’m Your Girlfriend speaks to a much larger trend in comedy: one that has elevated celebrities to the status of Tastemakers and Moral Guides, and that treats comedians, in particular, as a species of public intellectual.

Here’s Cummings, on the newly violent language of sex:

My theory is that women have gotten stronger, and as they get more self-sufficient, you guys are getting more aggressive towards us. Because 10, 15 years ago, you guys didn’t talk that way about us.

She adds:

Here’s the thing: I think feminism is working, but I think you guys are mad about it, and it’s coming out in nefarious ways. Like the way guys talk about women has gotten more aggressive. The way guys talk about having sex with women has gotten super violent.

I was talking to a guy friend of mine a few weeks ago, and he was like, “I hooked up with this girl the other night. Destroyed that shit.” I was like, “Excuse me?” He goes, “Yeah, dude, I murdered that shit, bro.”

She also adds:

Do you remember, there was a rumor going around for awhile that men like strong women? People would say that, they’d be like, “Men like strong women. Independent, strong women.”

Yeah—no, they don’t. Okay? I’ve seen porn. Men like Asian schoolgirls with duct tape over their mouths.

On the one hand: Cummings’s set is comedy that is directly in the tradition of George Carlin and Joan Rivers and Richard Pryor. And also, more recently, of Jon Stewart and Key & Peele and Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert and Amy Schumer and John Oliver and pretty much every other performer who’s currently enjoying a successful career in the field. Their comedy, very broadly, is distinguished by the fact that it isn’t content simply to elicit laughter. It’s comedy that has an ethic and a vision, and that even more importantly strives to convince its audience of the rightness of that vision. Comedy that argues and insinuates and in general has Something to Say about the world and its movements.

Cummings’s special, with its talk of theory and perspective and “power dynamics,” shows that work. These aren’t jokes-with-an-underlying message, buried subtly under layers, as per stand-up’s tradition, of self-loathing and/or braggadocio; the jokes, here, are the message. Cummings found a way to turn her jokes into theories, rather than vice versa. She used her HBO special—the performance of which was a “lifelong dream,” she confessed to her audience—for purposes of, essentially, punditry. If traditional observational comedy takes as its key premise the highlighting of the hard data of everyday life—the Seinfeldian “what’s up with airplane bathrooms?” and all that—Cummings used her time on HBO’s stage to analyze those data. She shared the theories she had formulated. She assessed and she argued. At points during the set, a casual channel-flipper could be forgiven for confusing HBO with PBS.

Which, again, is not to say that I’m Your Girlfriend isn’t funny. It is! Cummings’s observation that there’s no “CEO” category for women in porn, followed up by her declaration that “guys aren’t watching porn like, ‘Yeah, girl, get that promotion, yeahhhhh,’” is pretty much comedy gold. It’s just that Cummings doesn’t stop at comedy. Her set has higher aspirations than simply to make its audience laugh. It also wants to make them think.

All of that makes I’m Your Girlfriend a fitting embodiment of the general assumptions comedy (stand-up, and beyond) is making right now about its role, and its power, and its responsibilities. They’re assumptions that are influenced by YouTube and social media and Marc Maron and Comedy Bang! Bang! and the culture’s general insistence that celebrities can double as intellectuals without embarrassing themselves or the rest of us.

Cummings’s theories of feminism and relationships and the power dynamics therein are airing, after all, during a time that finds Lena Dunham campaigning for Hillary Clinton, and Elizabeth Banks lobbying for Planned Parenthood, and Shonda Rhimes moonlighting as an author, and Gwyneth Paltrow moonlighting as a life coach, and Sean Penn being Sean Penn. It’s the age of Caitlyn Jenner and Kim Kardashian and Bravo reality shows and Beyoncé’s athleisure line. It’s an age that, in conflating “celebrities” and “brands,” insists that actors and other entertainers are also, more broadly, “influencers.” That celebrities have something meaningful to say about how we normals should live our lives.

In that context, it makes some sense that comedians in particular—comedians, who have always brought a highly subjective and politics-inflected point of view to their work—would become, in their way, commentators. Tina Fey’s Bossypants is both a memoir and a feminist manifesto. Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance is both a memoir and a work of pop sociology. Marc Maron and (and also Zach Galifianakis and Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel) have interviewed President Obama. The girls from Broad City have yukked it up with Hillary Clinton. Amy Schumer recently visited the White House in her capacity as a gun-control activist. Stephen Colbert just interviewed Donald Rumsfeld—and grilled him about Iraq and the rise of ISIS. Hannibal Buress pretty much single-handedly took the Bill Cosby accusations from “open secret” to national news.

And comedians’ capacities as pundits are becoming, increasingly, institutionalized. There’s the digital-media frenzy, on Monday mornings, to post clips of John Oliver’s monologues from the night before. There’s the fact—the ultimately awkward fact, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert pointed out—that Chelsea Handler’s new Netflix series is classified as a “documentary,” and that Handler uses it to tackle issues like racism and sexism. There’s the fact that Samantha Bee, by way of her soon-to-air show, Full Frontal, is “trying to become a (humorous!) feminist voice we trust on topics … like, you know, electoral politics and public policy and global warming and immigration.” There’s the fact that Saturday Night Live, going back to the tradition of “bitch is the new black,” used its latest episode to weigh in on the #OscarsSoWhite discussion.

Which all makes some sense. Politics can be hard; relationships can be hard; negotiating the world, as a culture, can be hard. During a time of intense political partisanship, in particular, it can be difficult, and awkward, to talk about the things that need talking about. Racism. Sexism. Bill Cosby. Comedy, for its part, and whatever its failings may be, offers a kind of rhetorical purification: In a time of short fuses, its outrageousness can help to neutralize our outrage. Comedy, like Whitney Cummings herself, can have a point that goes far beyond laughter.

The Private Sector Is Now Providing Basic Services to Flint

A coalition of some of America’s biggest companies is organizing a trucklift for Flint, promising to deliver 6.5 million bottles of water to the city in order to provide clean drinking water for schoolchildren through 2016. Walmart, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and PepsiCo say they will deliver 6.5 million bottles to Flint, enough for the city’s 10,000 students.

In October, testing found toxic levels of lead in the water at Flint’s schools. The whole city is grappling with the malign effects of a switch from water provided by the Detroit system to water from the Flint River, which helped corrode the city’s pipes and leach lead into drinking water—in addition to turning the water a putrid brown. The state and federal governments have both declared states of emergency.

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That these firms are stepping up to deliver water is good news for Flint’s schools and citizens in the immediate term. But a one-time infusion of gallons of fresh water doesn’t do much to address the systemic failures of government that led to the water crisis in the first place. By making four for-profit corporations into a de facto public utility, the gift might actually risk making things worse in the long run.

The corporate giants aren’t the first to donate water. Everyone from churches to presidential campaigns to, uh, Marky Mark and Diddy have chipped in bottles. The state of Michigan has also begun to provide bottled water, as well as filters. Meanwhile, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette is blasting the city for continuing to charge residents for the water they use, even though they can’t safely drink it. In 2014, the average monthly bill was $140 a month.

According to a press release Monday, the state of Michigan has distributed 176,118 cases of water and 93,048 water filters. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, that comes to 4.2 million bottles of water—less than the Walmart/Coke/Nestlé/Pepsi commitment. That number is a little misleading, since the state will continue to distribute more water, whereas the corporate commitment applies to the remainder of the calendar year. But it gives a sense of just how huge the corporate donation is in the scale of response to the water crisis.

The Flint water crisis is above all a human tragedy: The effects of lead exposure on development can be lifelong and irreversible. But it is also a fundamental failure of government. At all levels, government failed to protect citizens. First, on the local level, the city was under the control of an emergency manager, appointed by the governor. Michigan’s emergency-manager law has the effect of severing people from their local governance, withdrawing power from elected officials. (This is by design; one theory is that elected officials are unwilling or unable to make decisions that would alienate voters. But the inverse is also true: Emergency managers can make decisions without accountability.) Local officials did, however, weigh in on the decision to switch away from Detroit water to the Flint River, and the city council voted in favor, 7-1. Once the switch had been made, state and federal officials failed to respond to reports about poisoned water. As I detailed last week, state officials tried to ignore the problem and insisted it was someone else’s mess to clean up. The EPA has also come in for criticism for being too deferential to the state; the regional administrator resigned last week.

Charity has always been an essential element of the American ethos, with private citizens, corporations, and philanthropies helping out in times of need. Yet the Flint case might give some reason for pause. Failures of government and the effective disenfranchisement of Flint voters produced the crisis, and now private-sector philanthropy is jumping in to fill the gap. But that may introduce its own problems.

In 2014, Gara LaMarche, the president of Democracy Alliance and former president of The Atlantic Philanthropies, wrote a searching essay for Democracy interrogating the role of philanthropic organizations. Despite his career in the sector, LaMarche wrote, he worried about “the undemocratic and largely unaccountable nature of philanthropy”:

Why are we—since I too have failed, for years, to ask these big questions—hypersensitive to the dangers of big money in politics, and the way it perpetuates advantage and inequality, but blind, it seems, to the dangers of big philanthropy in the public sphere?

LaMarche feared a situation in which the largesse of a philanthropist like Bill Gates would allow him to direct the course of events, without any accountability to the public—after all, it’s his money and his foundation. But the big water donation might raise even more uncomfortable questions. Walmart, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Pepsi aren’t just charitable organizations that might have their own ideologies. They’re for-profit companies. And by providing water to the public schools for the remainder of the year, the four companies have effectively supplanted the local water authorities and made themselves an indispensable public utility, but without any amount of public regulation or local accountability. Many people in Flint may want government to work better, but with sufficient donations, they may find that the private sector has supplanted many of government’s functions altogether.

Obama's Executive Actions on Solitary Confinement

President Obama has issued executive actions to ban the use of solitary confinement for juvenile offenders in federal prisons across the country.

Obama wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that ran in the Tuesday edition of the newspaper that solitary confinement is overused and can lead to dangerous psychological consequences.

“How can we subject prisoners to unnecessary solitary confinement, knowing its effects, and then expect them to return to our communities as whole people?” the president wrote. “It doesn’t make us safer. It’s an affront to our common humanity.”

The executive actions also prohibit wardens from using solitary confinement as punishment for inmates who commit “low-level infractions” inside prison walls, according to the White House. The measures call for an increase in number of hours solitary-confinement inmates spend outside of their cells; the expansion of alternative housing units for inmates with mental illnesses; the hiring of more staff psychologists; and policies that discourage wardens from putting inmates in solitary confinements during the last 180 days of their prison terms, “making it easier for inmates to adjust when they return to the community.”

“In America, we believe in redemption,” Obama wrote in the op-ed. “We believe that when people make mistakes, they deserve the opportunity to remake their lives.”

The reforms will affect some 10,000 prisoners held in restrictive housing in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, though, as The Post’s Juliet Eilperin points out, only a handful of juvenile offenders are placed in such housing each year.

The White House said the Bureau of Federal Prisons will begin publishing monthly data on solitary confinement use on the system’s website.

The actions six months after the president asked the Justice Department to review the use of solitary confinement in the federal prison system. They are part of a greater push by the administration for criminal-justice reform, which Obama has called a “bipartisan priority” for his last year in office.

Some states have recently lapped the federal government on solitary-confinement reforms. Last month, New York announced it would place one-quarter of the state’s 4,000 prisoners in restrictive units in less isolated housing, pursuant to a settlement with the New York Civil Liberties Union. In September, a California court ruling ended indeterminate-length sentences in restrictive housing, releasing almost all prisoners who spent more than 10 years in prolonged isolation, including more than 400 inmates in Pelican Bay State Prison, into the general inmate population.

As my colleague Matt Ford has noted, no one knows exactly how many people are currently kept in isolation in the United States, in both state and federal correctional facilities, as official nationwide counts don’t exist. The most commonly cited figure is 80,000.

Why the Oscars Had to Change

In 2014, Steve McQueen made history at the Oscars as the first black director of a Best Picture-winning movie, 12 Years a Slave. It was a heartening moment for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, coming at the end of a telecast that was the most-watched Oscars ceremony in more than a decade. But since then, the Oscars have failed to nominate a single actor of color for two successive years, and the continued outcry has led to significant action being taken by the Academy’s president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs.

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The proposed new measures aim to prune Academy members who no longer actively work in the film industry, while doubling voters of color and female members over the next four years. There are clauses and loopholes, of course, and members who lose voting rights will retain “emeritus” status (basically allowing them to still receive screeners of Oscar-nominated films), but the move could still radically reshape the 6,000-member voting body over the next few years. It’s a huge development that comes just a week after Spike Lee announced he wouldn’t attend the ceremony this year. And the more individual Academy members protest over the changes, the more it seems like they were long overdue.

Just a year after 12 Years a Slave’s worthy victory (which some right-wing blogs dismissed as a triumph of “white guilt”), the Oscars were pilloried when Ava DuVernay’s Martin Luther King biopic Selma received only one major Oscar nomination, for Best Picture. It seemed strange that a film so suited to the Academy’s taste—so steeped in history and widely praised, with such a transformative performance at its center—could miss with voters. Some blamed a lackluster campaign, while others anonymously bashed the film as “artless,” but one familiar voice pointed out a wider trend in typically candid fashion.

“Anyone who thinks [2015] was gonna be like last year is retarded,” Spike Lee told The Daily Beast in an interview. “There were a lot of black folks up there with 12 Years a Slave, Steve [McQueen], Lupita [Nyong’o], Pharrell. It’s in cycles of every 10 years. Once every 10 years or so I get calls from journalists about how people are finally accepting black films. Before last year, it was the year [in 2002] with Halle Berry, Denzel [Washington], and Sidney Poitier. It’s a 10-year cycle. So I don’t start doing backflips when it happens.”

Lee was perhaps too pithy, as he often is—several notable black actors won Oscars between 2002 and 2014—but his larger point seemed prescient. Despite the historic nature of its victory, 12 Years a Slave wasn’t indicative of a larger trend in Hollywood toward embracing stories made by and starring people of color; if anything, the opposite was true. The 2015 and 2016 nomination lists had their standouts, their critical favorites, their big-budget blockbusters, but there were a number of works they consistently overlooked.

On the surface Creed or Straight Outta Compton might not seem like typical “Oscar-bait,” but both were Hollywood success stories through and through, with the kind of mythmaking the Academy recognizes all the time. Every question as to why they hadn’t fared better circled back to a depressing statistic: Academy voters are 93 percent white and 76 percent male.

This is what Isaacs is hoping to address. In a memo presented to members, she noted that the closed-circle, invite-only perception of the Academy might have hurt its chances of attracting new people. “The concern has been that a lot of highly qualified potential members were falling outside our radar,” she said. “Many thought they had to wait to be invited, and didn’t know they could apply for membership, through a sponsorship process. We are not lowering any standards, we’re widening our net.”

Tell that to the voters. A series of op-eds published by The Hollywood Reporter has exposed the entrenched nature of incumbency, as members who’ve contributed little to film in recent decades publicly rail at the perception that they’re part of the problem. Of course, these voices reflect only a small segment of the Academy’s 6,000 members. But they’re revealing nonetheless.

Stephen Geller, a screenwriter whose last major work was a 1972 adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five, wrote an open letter to Isaacs calling diversity a “false flag issue” and arguing that the Academy had never “dealt with contemporary realities.” Milton Justice, who won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1987, called the changes “insulting to black people,” saying Selma’s only problem was that not enough voters liked it. Tab Hunter, a member of the actor’s branch with his own fascinating Hollywood history, described the changes as a “thinly-veiled ploy to kick out older white contributors.” The actress Penelope Ann Miller seemed personally affronted, writing, “To imply that this is because all of us are racists is extremely offensive … it was just an incredibly competitive year.”

The idea that voters simply didn’t like Selma enough ignores the larger issue of representation in the voting body. The Academy, like any other large voting group, tends towards a consensus, but it’s likely that consensus might shift if its voters looks more like the country around it. The changes proposed by Isaacs may work, or they may not be enough. Beyond them, the film industry has many other structural issues it will need to address before real progress can be made.

Asked about the recent controversy, Steve McQueen said that while voter demographics need to change, that isn’t enough. “The real issue is movies being made,” he told The Guardian. “Decisions being made by heads of studios, TV companies, and cable companies about what is and is not being made. That is the start. That is the root of the problem.” He’s right—and yet one of the biggest things that informs those decisions is whether a film has Oscar potential. It’s a Hollywood economy onto itself, one that spurs the funding of independent and big-budget films alike. The Academy matters, and if its voting body can change, a lot of Hollywood might start to change with it.  

A Retroactive Break for Juvenile Offenders

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday in Montgomery v. Alabama that its ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders also applied retroactively, making more than 2,000 inmates nationwide eligible for resentencing or the possibility of eventual freedom.

The Court ruled four years ago in Miller v. Alabama that states could not sentence juvenile defendants to die in prison without considering their maturity, upbringing, or potential to reoffend, citing their lessened culpability as minors at the time of the crime. That ruling only applied to ongoing and future cases; Montgomery sought to apply it to final sentences nationwide.

Based on the Court’s precedents, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the six-justice majority, “prisoners like Montgomery must be given the opportunity to show their crime did not reflect irreparable corruption; and, if it did not, their hope for some years of life outside prison walls must be restored.” States may choose either to hold resentencing hearings for each of the prisoners, he wrote, or they may keep their current sentences in place but give them the opportunity for parole.

The case was brought by Henry Montgomery, a Louisiana inmate who challenged his sentence for the killing of an East Baton Rouge sheriff’s deputy in 1963, when Montgomery was 17 years old. Racial animosity at the time of his trial was so intense, including reported local cross burnings by the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, that the Louisiana Supreme Court voided his original death sentence.

A jury found him “guilty without capital punishment” upon retrial, thereby automatically sentencing him to life without parole. At the time, Louisiana’s procedures did not allow defendants like Montgomery to present mitigating evidence—in this case, his youth—before the sentence was handed down. Now 69 years old, Montgomery has spent his entire adult life behind bars.

In the intervening years, the Supreme Court chipped away at the use of society’s most severe punishments against defendants who were under the age of 18 when they committed a crime. The first hammerstroke came in 2005, when the justices struck down the death penalty for juvenile offenders in Roper v. Simmons. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued that society views children as less culpable for their actions than adult criminals, that they have the potential for rehabilitation, and that a “national consensus” had formed against their execution.

Drawing on Roper's reasoning, the Supreme Court then abolished life-without-parole sentences for juvenile offenders in non-homicide crimes in the 2010 case of Graham v. Florida. Terrance Graham had been sentenced to life imprisonment for armed robbery at age 16, and Florida’s abolition of parole meant he would serve the sentence until death. “The State has denied him any chance to later demonstrate that he is fit to rejoin society based solely on a nonhomicide crime that he committed while he was a child in the eyes of the law,” Kennedy wrote. “This the Eighth Amendment does not permit.”

The dissenting justices, for their part, complained that the majority had gone too far, breaching the barrier between the Court’s death-penalty rulings and the rest of the criminal-justice system. “For the first time in its history, the Court declares an entire class of offenders immune from a noncapital sentence using the categorical approach it previously reserved for death penalty cases alone,” Justice Clarence Thomas complained in dissent. “‘Death is different’ no more.”

After Graham, a juvenile offender could only receive a life-without-parole sentence for murder. But in some states, these sentences could be imposed on a mandatory basis, without weighing a defendant’s maturity, culpability, and potential for rehabilitation.

Such was the fate of Evan Miller and Kuntrell Jackson, two 14-year-olds with deeply troubled upbringings and histories of drug addiction and suicide. Miller and Jackson were each convicted of homicide during the course of separate armed robberies; Alabama and Arkansas respectively handed down automatic life-without-parole sentences to them. In 2012, the Court ruled in Miller v. Alabama that this also violated the Eighth Amendment.

The majority, led this time by Justice Elena Kagan, declined to forbid all juvenile life-without-parole sentences for homicide. Instead, she wrote, the system must distinguish between “unfortunate yet transient immaturity,” such as that demonstrated by the two defendants in the case, and “irreparable corruption.” The latter, she said, would likely be “uncommon.”

The Court’s decision in Miller meant mandatory life-without-parole sentences can’t be given to juvenile defendants now or in the future. But the obvious question arose: What about the more than 2,000 inmates already serving one?

Until the 1960s, the Supreme Court generally applied its constitutional rules retroactively to finalized cases. Only when the Warren Court launched its massive overhaul of the American criminal-justice system in the 1950s and 1960s did the justices attempt to limit their own rulings to ongoing and future cases. Constantly re-litigating past convictions and sentences whenever the Court tweaked a statute or procedure, the logic went, would be a ruinous burden for the legal system.

At the same time, allowing constitutionally erroneous sentences to stand could undermine the legitimacy of the criminal-justice system. My colleague Garrett Epps, in his coverage of Montgomery’s oral arguments, summarized the latter quandary well:

The question of “retroactivity” is an important battleground in criminal law. Say that you are in prison, convicted of a crime. You believe that some feature of your trial—the racial makeup of the jury and the selection process that produced it, say—violated the Constitution. You argued the issue in state court; when you lost there, you appealed your conviction to the state supreme court; when you lost there, you petitioned the Supreme Court for review. Without comment, the Supreme Court denied review. Your conviction and sentence are now final.

One morning you read that the Supreme Court has decided that this precise feature of the trial actually was a violation of the Constitution. Under this decision, you should clearly win.

What can you do? Your conviction has been upheld on appeal, and denied by the Court. This process—called “direct review”—is over and nothing can revive it.

Once this happens, a inmate's only hope for relief is through “collateral review,” this time in the federal courts. But the Supreme Court’s rulings, especially Teague v. Lane in 1989, limit how lower courts can provide retroactive relief when interpreting the Court’s new constitutional rules.

The crucial question is whether a new constitutional rule is substantive or procedural. Under the Court’s definitions, substantive rules—those governing who can be tried, of what crimes they can be convicted, or to what punishments they can be sentenced—are presumptively retroactive. Procedural rules, which affect the manner in which defendants are tried, are not.

Imagine setting rules for air travel—some substantive, and some procedural. The substantive rules who govern who could board a flight and where it could land; the procedural rules would address the routes it would take to get there. Only the changes to the boarding and landing rules would be presumptively retroactive; changes in flight routes would not be.

(The exception is if the Court pronounces a new “watershed” procedural rule that reshapes the “fundamental fairness” of American criminal law—something on the same order of magnitude as, say, requiring states to provide lawyers for poor defendants. But the Court has yet to hand down a “watershed” rule since theorizing about it, and it seems unlikely to do so in the future.)

For the Montgomery majority on Monday, Miller clearly created a substantive rule to be applied retroactively. “Because Miller determined that sentencing a child to life without parole is excessive for all but ‘the rare juvenile offender whose crime reflects irreparable corruption,’ it rendered life without parole an unconstitutional penalty for ‘a class of defendants because of their status’—that is, juvenile offenders whose crimes reflect the transient immaturity of youth,” Kennedy wrote. “As a result, Miller announced a substantive rule of constitutional law.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, who dissented alongside Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, sharply disagreed. He began by challenging the jurisdictional grounds, arguing that Montgomery’s case was still in the state courts, not the federal courts, and therefore should be beyond the Court’s interference for now.

The majority disagreed. When a new substantive rule guides the outcome of a case, the Court ruled for the first time, state courts must also apply new substantive rules retroactively, not just lower federal courts. Since Miller’s rule emanated from the federal Constitution, the Louisiana Supreme Court’s refusal to apply it invited the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention.

Scalia then turned to the substance. “Having distorted Teague, the majority simply proceeds to rewrite Miller,” he wrote, noting that the Court in Miller wrote that the ruling “does not categorically bar a penalty for a class of offenders or type of crime ... Instead, it mandates only that a sentencer follow a certain process.” This, he argues, indicates a procedural rule, not a substantive one.

Kennedy countered by citing the Court’s ban on executing people with intellectual disabilities, noting that inmates must still show evidence of their disability at a hearing. “Those procedural requirements do not, of course, transform substantive rules into procedural one,” he wrote for the Court. “The procedure Miller prescribes is no different.”

But Scalia sensed more at work. “This whole exercise, this whole distortion of Miller, is just a devious way of eliminating life without parole for juvenile offenders,” he replied. The majority cannot ban it outright, Scalia suggests, because Kennedy himself cited the punishment’s existence to justify abolishing the death penalty for juvenile offenders in Roper in 2005.

Now the majority’s only recourse, Scalia argues, is to make it impossible to carry out through these new hurdles. “And then, in Godfather fashion, the majority makes state legislatures an offer they can’t refuse: Avoid all the utterly impossible nonsense we have prescribed by simply ‘permitting juvenile homicide offenders to be considered for parole,’" he concludes. “Mission accomplished.”