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The Pirates of Penzanze
(operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan)

When I went into a cafe the other day and said to the man behind the counter, "Could I have a hamburger, please?" he said, "Do you want to eat it here or take it away?"

And I said, "With a bit of luck, I'd like to do both."

Now I mention that, because what it emphasizes is the strange phenomenon which has absolutely revolutionized English eating habits: take-away foods. Now that is a completely new development. There's so many varieties of take-away food you can get: kebab, that's a fancy name for what, when you get it home, turns out to be nothing but a fry-up on a skewer. And still in the east there's the Indian take-aways, which offer chipotees and pop-a-doms and curry with the singe on top. And there's Japanese take-aways. I don't really know WHAT they sell; I imagine it must be those karate chops. And then the most successful of all are the Chinese take-aways. Our local one has done so well, they've bought a wacking great limousine to make deliveries in. We call it the Rolls Rice.

However, what you may have noticed about all these things is that they have one common factor, all these take-away places, and that is the foods they offer are all of foreign origin. And that's why I think a mate of mine, called Ben, is on to what could well turn out to be a gold mine. Because he has an idea for opening a shop that will sell take-away steak and kidney pies, real English steak and kidney pies, which are to be cooked by his elderly Aunt Em and his elderly Aunt Bea.

Now, unfortunately, his plans have set suffered a setback. Like all simple, old-fashioned aunties. Auntie Em and Auntie Bea will cook ONLY with the very best ingredients. And where steak and kidney pies are concerned, that means the very best steak and the very best kidneys.

Now, have you any idea what that costs?

There are those who will deny that meat is that expensive. My butcher does. And his butler. And his two undergardeners. Nevertheless there was a story in the paper the other day about a gang of thieves who broke into a Smithfield cold store, stole a quantity of filet steak to the value of sixty-eight thousand pounds and got away in a Volkswagon.

So you perhaps appreciate why it is that Ben's plan for Auntie Em and Auntie Bea's Take-away Steak and Kidney Pie Palace, although it's a good idea in theory, in practice, what it looks like is enough steak and kidney pies to feed four people will work out to the rate of something like nine pounds, seventy-six p.

Well the ironic thing is, that my poor friend looks like LOSING a fortune on the very thing that made Gilbert and Sullivan gain a fortune.

In other words, the pie rates of Ben's aunts.

Dennis Norden 731127a

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Nothing to indicate that no resuscitative care should be provided. But Bob Manning had no interest in dying; after almost forty years of living with almost complete paralysis, he was a remarkably vital man.

As Dr. Chew noted when he told me about this incident, end-of-life decisions are a fit subject for a physician to discuss with a patient. But this nurse was not a caregiver; she was an agent of a company that would lose money if Manning went on living and would profit from his death.

"She was asking me to die," Manning told me.

Dr. Chew agreed: "She wanted Bob to have a DNR order and was quite insistent."

The nurse turned out to be an employee of a medical advice company called Concentra. When I asked Tom Fogarty, the doctor who is a cofounder of Concentra about this, he did something unusual. Unlike the top executives who will not come to the phone or who speak only through written statements, Fogarty set out to find out what happened. When he got back to me he was guarded about what he shared, but he made it clear he was aghast that any medical professional representing a financial interest in someone's life would even inquire about a DNR order. He also volunteered that after a brief spell, his company had gotten out of the line of business that the nurse had been part of. How much better American business would be if we had more chief executives who dealt forthrightly with issues instead of hiding behind publicists and lawyers, not to mention squads of burly security guards.

Now, to be clear, I do not think for a moment that Warren Buffett knew that the nurse working for his Cologne Re insurance company was going to ask Bob Manning, in effect, to die the next time he had a medical emergency. But that does not mean Buffett is free of responsibility for what happened. Buffett often says that his style is to let his managers run their shops, as long as they make their numbers, meaning their expected level of profit. His management style is widely praised in news reports and in profiles of the "Oracle of Omaha." By giving managers the freedom to run their business units as they see fit, Buffett takes on a duty to demand the highest ethical standards. That would not, in my opinion, include gouging customers on coal shipping rates as his BNSF railroad does. Nor would an ethical chief executive allow anyone in his employ ever to suggest that anyone should die to bolster a company's profits. But that is what happens under the Buffett style, in which by his own account he focuses on whether managers, some of whom resort to immoral conduct to give their billionaire boss what he demands, "make their numbers."

The reality is that what Manning had been saying all along, even before we met in 1997, was true. The insurance company wanted him to die. They had made it difficult for him to get care, they had for years refused to replace the crane Helen used to hoist him out of bed after the gears were stripped, they made it hard for him to get supplies to avoid infections. And finally a nurse hired by a Warren Buffett company carne right out and asked him, in effect, why he was not going to die the next time he had a medical emergency.

Bob Manning lived until 2009. To this day, his family says they are still owed money to which he was entitled. They are owed more than that.

David Cay Johnston "Free Lunch" (2007)

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson worked to advance the U.S. relationship with India throughout the first year of the Trump administration. The South Asian republic, the world's most populous democracy and one of its fastest-growing economies, was a natural ally the United States. Tillerson felt strongly that America needed to fortify its alliances and block rivals, chief among them China, from taking advantage of any gaps or friction between the United States and its strategic partners. To that end, he believed that if the United States strengthened its transpacific alliance with India, Japan, and Australia, with open trade and shipping routes, it could keep China at bay.

In October 2017, Tillerson telegraphed the administration's hopes for the region and India in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and then jetted to New Delhi to discuss the alliance in person with Prime Minister Narendra Modi: Tillerson was immediately impressed by Modi. The prime minister was a serious person, an experienced deal maker who was motivated by the prospects of a strategic partnership with the United States. Modi was candid with Tillerson about his challenges. He was operating in a tough neighborhood. On one border was Pakistan, India's greatest threat, and on another was China which had been trying to partner with Pakistan. To the north was Afghanistan, which was ravaged by war, highly unstable, and vulnerable to Russia and other countries. As he considered allies for India, Modi had options. He was inclined to deal with the United States, but if things ever went sour, Russia was knocking on his door.

The second week of November, President Trump took his first trip to Asia, a five-country, ten-day journey that concluded in the Philippines, where he attended a global summit of leaders. On November 13, Trump sat down with Modi in Manila on the sidelines of the summit. Tillerson had high hopes for the meeting - even though, back at the White House, Trump was known to have affected an Indian accent to imitate Modi, a sign of disrespect for the prime minister.

As with most of his foreign leader meetings, Trump had been briefed but didn't appear to have retained the material and instead tried to wing it. He took a hard right turn into a nitpicky complaint about trade imbalances. Modi tried to refocus on the threats India faced from Afghanistan, China, and Pakistan. His mention of Afghanistan led Trump off into a lengthy tangent about how stupid it had been for the United States to maintain its military presence in Afghanistan for so many years. When Modi mentioned his concern about China's ambitions and aggression in the region, Trump revealed a stunning ignorance about geography.

"It's not like you've got China on your border," Trump said, seeming to dismiss the threat to India.

Modi's eyes bulged out in surprise. Aides noticed him giving a sidelong glance at Tillerson, who accompanied Trump as part of the U.S. delegation. The Indian prime minister considered Tillerson among the best-versed Americans on the region's security challenges, and together they had been plotting a new partnership. Tillerson's eyes flashed open wide at Trump's comment, but he quickly put his hand to his brow, appearing to the Indian delegation to attempt not to offend the president as well as to signal to Modi that he knew this statement was nuts.

Trump did not appear to notice their silent exchange. He just kept rolling, droning on about-unrelated topics. Modi tried to keep the conversation an elevated plane, hoping to follow the path Tillerson had laid out for them in the previous weeks to work together to protect India and fend off China's Belt and Road Initiative. But each time Modi tried to get Trump to engage on the substance of U.S.-India relations, the American president veered off on another non sequitur about trade deficits and the endless war in Afghanistan. Those who witnessed the meeting that day in Manila were disheartened. Modi's expression gradually shifted, from shock and concern to resignation.

"I think he left that meeting and said, 'This is not a serious man, I cannot count on this man as a partner,' " one Trump aide recalled. After that meeting, "the Indians took a step back" in their diplomatic relations with the United States.

The meeting with Modi was a major setback not only for U.S.-India relations but also for the administration's hopes of checkmating China in the region. The meeting came at a time when Tillerson's influence with Trump was growing simply because the president had tired of others in his orbit. In preparation for the Asia trip, John Kelly asked Tillerson if he could add another duty to his already-full portfolio: Could he give Trump his national security briefings on the road?

This request was odd. Briefing the president was normally the responsibility of the national security adviser. Tillerson asked Kelly why.

"He doesn't want to see McMaster," Kelly responded.

The signs of Trump's fraying patience for H. R. McMaster had been painfully obvious throughout the fall. McMaster's loyal staff hated to admit it, but they knew this relationship was no longer working.

A military intellectual and policy maestro, McMaster was widely respected in Washington's foreign policy establishment and on Capitol Hill, but he did not easily fit into Trump's orbit. This much was evident right away. In his first town-hall meeting of the National Security Council staff after being appointed in February 2017, McMaster emphasized that as a nonpartisan army officer he did not vote. He wanted the professional staff to know that he valued their input, but his admonition about voting unwittingly sent a message to Trump, who demanded political loyalty from everyone in his administration.

McMaster lived by paperwork and process. He believed his duty was to give the president information so that he could make the best decisions, and then to help carry out the commander in chief's will. But his briefings to Trump were academic and detail-oriented, and the two men's stylistic differences inspired epic clashes.

McMaster had difficulty holding the president's attention. Trump, meanwhile, would get annoyed with what he considered McMaster's lecturing style. The president felt his national security adviser was always determined to try to "teach me something." Indeed, Trump constantly shifted and grumbled when staff were trying to bring him up to speed on a topic, immediately threatened by the notion that his knowledge wasn't sufficient if he needed experts. As the president repeatedly told Kelly when he proposed a subject briefing: "I don't want to talk to anyone. I know more than they do. I know better than anybody else."

McMaster came across as a tank commander in his bearing and didn't seem able to change gears to the far more politically cautious mode of White House hedging and dodging. He had a barking kind of voice, which had reliably conveyed strength and directness in his previous world. But it proved to be a pitch Trump disliked instantly, as if it were a piercing dog whistle.

Some mornings, Trump would come down to the Oval Office and see the President's Daily Brief on his schedule, followed by a meeting with the national security adviser, and complain. "I'm not fucking doing that," he told aides. "I'm not talking with McMaster for an hour. Are you kidding me?" Instead, the president would step into his private dining room, turn on the television, and summon National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin, or commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to come over and keep him company.

In March, McMaster was in the Oval Office briefing Trump on the visit of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a favorite foil for the president. Trump got so impatient that he stood up and walked into an adjoining bathroom, left the door ajar, and instructed McMaster to raise his voice and keep talking. It was unclear if the strange scene was a reflection of Trump's feelings about McMaster or Merkel or both.

McMaster felt it was his duty to speak truth to his commander, to notify the president of critically important issues, and even to highlight bad news and the cons of a particular strategy Trump was considering. That's how McMaster had always spoken to his wartime commanders, when he was reporting from the battlefield: "Things have gone to hell, sir. Here's how bad it is." But Trump's intelligence briefers downplayed or withheld new developments regarding Russia's election interference or cyber intrusions, so as not to agitate the commander in chief. When they left a key piece of information out of the verbal President's Daily Brief, McMaster would later raise it directly with Trump, only to become a punching bag for the president when he inevitably blew up. The routine frustrated McMaster.

Part of McMaster's process entailed providing Trump with written briefing documents on each big decision, with detailed descriptions of the risks and possible rewards. He had tried to be concise from the get-go, boiling the material down to three pages, but McMaster and his team almost immediately realized the president wasn't reading any of briefing books, or even the concise three-page version. Staff secretary Rob Porter would synthesize the memos in a one-page cover letter, written in prose the president might find easier to digest. As one of Trump's confidants said, "I call the president the two-minute man. The president has patience for a half page." But McMaster understandably resented the fact that Trump was reading Porter's version of CliffsNotes. Porter and Reince Priebus suggested an alternative approach: McMaster could deliver verbal briefings to Trump. Nothing in writing.

"Everyone agreed we needed to stop giving the president paper to read," one former National Security Council staffer recalled. "H.R. was uncomfortable with this. McMaster kept saying, 'How are we not going to give the president any papers?' "

McMaster and his deputies were mindful of history and fearful of failing to document a risk or of missing an important alarm. Preside George W. Bush had faced withering criticism when it was discovered that in the summer of 2001 he had been briefed on intelligence suggesting Osama bin Laden planned to orchestrate terror attacks using airplanes. Bush had actually received briefing books on this, but the intelligence did not prompt any corrective action. Eliminating briefing books for the president seemed to tempt disaster. McMaster came up with yet another plan that the staff put into full effect in September: note cards with bulleted factoids.

Other top officials in the White House saw McMaster and some of his top deputies as overly suspicious. They fretted about the national security adviser's standing with the president and fought at times with others in the building, including Keith Kellogg, another army lieutenant general who served as the chief of staff on the NSC but was loyal to Trump above all.

By the time of the November trip to Asia, Trump was openly mocking McMaster. When McMaster arrived in his office for a briefing, Trump would puff up his chest, sit up straight in his chair, and fake shout like a boot camp drill sergeant. In his play, he pretended to be McMaster. "I'm your national security adviser, General McMaster, sir!" Trump would say, trying to amuse the others in the room. "I'm here to give you your briefing, sir!"

Then Trump would ridicule McMaster further by describing the topic of the day and deploying a series of large, complex phrases to indicate how boring McMaster's briefing was going to be. The National Security Council staff were deeply disturbed by Trump's treatment of their boss. "The president doesn't fire people," said one of McMaster's aides. "He just tortures them until they're willing to quit." The cruelty also was uncomfortable for Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Kelly, and other advisers to watch. Kelly was weary of McMaster's inability to take the hint that Trump was done listening. One day in the fall, Trump was meeting with a group of his advisers in the Oval Office, and Kelly decided the president was growing more obstinate on an issue and it was time for the gathering to break up.

"Thank you very much," Kelly said. "Everyone can leave now."

McMaster moved closer to. the Resolute Desk and said, "Mr. President, I'd like to keep talking to you. I have a few more things."

Kelly did not take kindly to McMaster disobeying his order. The chief of staff stood nose to nose with the national security adviser and decreed, "I said the meeting was over."

Here was a four-star marine general and a three-star army general nearly coming to blows in front of the president of the United States. Trump loved it, later telling another adviser that he was impressed by Kelly's willingness to confront McMaster and the sheer machismo he exuded. "This guy is an animal," the president remarked, complimenting Kelly. That the president's narrow bandwidth might have been the root cause of the disagreement didn't seem to cross his mind.

On the Asia trip, both Tillerson and McMaster hopped into the president's vehicle in succession to give Trump his morning update before the motorcade took off for its appointed meetings. But as McMaster spoke, Trump frowned, turned his back, and interrupted him midsentence to ask Tillerson a question. It was a not-very-gentle cue for Tillerson to take over the role of updating the president on the key facts he needed to know. Tillerson engaged in a little small talk, then returned to tee up the debates Trump would tackle in his meetings that day.

"As H.R. was saying, Mr. President," Tillerson began, a sign of respect and deference to the national security adviser at an otherwise painful moment. Tillerson didn't always agree with McMaster on style or process, but he told aides the man was selfless and dedicated to the mission.

McMaster had occasional disagreements with Trump, such as over the long-term strategy in Afghanistan and the Iran nuclear agreement. Unlike several other senior advisers, though, he genuinely tried to help implement the president's wishes. Rather than impose his own agenda, McMaster generally sought to curate the opinions of the relevant administration officials and present a range of options to Trump.

"Sometimes you have very forceful differences of opinion among the president's senior advisers," Senator Tom Cotton, a McMaster ally, said at the time. "H.R. is indispensable in helping the president hear all those viewpoints and have the information he needs, and framed in time for the president to make a decision."

U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley added, "When we're in those meetings, he's all about getting options on the table for the president."

Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig "A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America" (2019)

One more issue needed resolving before rehearsals started: what was the show going to be called? The authors and Prince had batted around ideas for months and they all agreed only that "Tevye" was too bland and too vague. "A Village Story," "To Life," "Listen to the Fiddle," "Make a Circle," "Once There Was a Town": their list kept growing, but nothing zinged. "To Light a Candle," "My Village," "Three Brides and a Man," "A Village Tune," "Homemade Wine," "Not So Long Ago," dozens more. The authors liked "Where Poppa Came From," but Prince preferred a name that suggested that the show was a musical. In late March, he called the question. "Anything on the list will do," Stein told him. "I don't care anymore." Prince scanned the list and made the choice. "But it doesn't mean anything," Stein said. Prince shrugged and replied, "Well, that's the title." Fiddler on the Roof went into rehearsal on June 1.

Alisa Solomon "Wonder of Wonders" (2013)

He who hesitates is lost
(proverb)

I don't know how many people listening to this program, there must be literally dozens, are going to Ian and Cynthia Hope-Willaby's fancy dress party tomorrow. But if any of you who are listening are going, then I'm going to tell you something which will make somebody there happy.

They have sort of schemes and you always have to come as something. So this year the invitation came and it was "Come as a Sin"

I must be able device a costume immediately recognizable. So, I paraded myself in front of my wife, and said "What are you going as?"

And she said, "I'm going as lust."

And she showed me her costume. I must say it was pretty good. It was immediately recognizable after about an hour and an explanation in writing.

It was a pair of flame-colored tights, on which she'd embroidered, or was going to have embroidered, slogans like "Kiss me quick I'm nearly forty." And this represented lust. I didn't hold up much hope for her. But I thought very carefully about mine. And I got my daughter's old very long fur coat, which she bought for one and nine at a white elephant store in the village market and buttoned that up at the neck and I sewed the skirts together to make sort of trousers and I put my gum boots on and I cut two wedges in the toes of the gum boot and I was going as a sloth.

And I thought if I hang upside down with my fur coat on (you have to climb up on a step ladder). If you hook your toes in the gum boots over the edge of a door, you can really hang quite reasonably. There's a tendency to get bloodshot hair after about an hour. It is not dangerous at all, unless somebody comes rushing in the door, which happened, and not only was the back of my head bumped against the wall, but I came out of my gum boots and landed on my head.

And when the doctor had given me sedatives the twitching, (this is yesterday) stopped. But he said, "You mustn't go out, you must take it very calmly. It's OK to do My Word, 'cause that's no problem, just sitting there pretending you know things, but you can't go tomorrow to the party."

And I thought, "Well, I can't go."

And I was explaining that to my wife as she came rushing in and said, "The most terrible thing. I took my red tights, my flame-colored, lustful tights, soon to be embroidered with 'kiss me quick I'm nearly forty' to Cynthia, the woman who does all the embroidering, and she'd delivered the wrong ones."

And my wife hadn't gotten her flame tights embroidered with 'kiss me quicky, I'm nearly forty' on them. Instead she got a voluminous pair of trousers with a slice of bacon stitched onto the kneecap, obviously gluttony. And her tights are gone, some fellow obviously got hers, so she couldn't go to the party either. So neither of us is going tot he party, which is marvelous

But if anybody is, any of you in the audience tomorrow. That fat chap is going to have (who left his trousers with a slice of bacon) is going to have my wife's tights on. and you know who he's meant to be, so at least recognize his instantly and make his evening.

All you've got to remember is the garment she was wearing: flame tights embroidered. And, so when you get in tomorrow look around all the company, and he who has her tights is lust.

Frank Muir 731127 b

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Wouldn't it be marvelous if someone else paid your income taxes? Imagine all that extra money in your paycheck. You could pay your debts, set aside a few dollars, or splurge on something special. Of course, if someone else had to pay your income taxes it would not be such a good deal for them. They would have to pay their own income taxes and yours. You wouldn't want to be that person, would you?

Well, in a sense, you already are. There's a federal regulation that makes us pay someone else's taxes and, worse yet, that somebody is exempt from federal income taxes, meaning they pocket the tax money we give them as extra profits.

This policy comes from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

FERC sets the level of water behind hydroelectric dams and oversees electricity grids and wholesale electric markets whose initial rules were written by Enron and then adopted by government. FERC also sets the rates pipelines charge to transport oil and natural gas across state lines but which are exempt from corporate income tax.

As federal agencies go, FERC is small. Its budget amounts to about a quarter of a billion dollars a year, less than a tenth of a penny on each dollar in the federal budget. And its staff is modest, too, about fifteen hundred people.

Most federal agencies have struggled for years with flat or shrinking real budgets, but not FERC. Its 2010 budget was 9 percent larger than in 2009, which in turn was 10 percent more than in 2008. Congress approved these increases because the energy industry wanted FERC's budget to grow. That may seem odd, given how often we hear how businesses dislike being regulated. But FERC's funding is just one of its peculiarities.

As it happens, FERC's budget does not come from the taxes you pay to Washington. Instead, the commission is financed with fees paid by the industries it regulates, industries that get their money from you. Energy companies gladly pay those fees because they help ensure incredible profits, like those earned by pipelines.

To put this into perspective, tax records show that the 5.8 million corporations in America keep as profit about six cents on each dollar of revenue. The 14,000 largest do better, keeping as profit roughly a dime on each dollar of revenue. And how well do oil pipelines do? Their profit is forty-two cents on the dollar.

Measured against assets, the story of bloated profits is the same.

American companies earned 6.7 percent on their assets in 2010, according to calculations done by the federal Bureau of Economic, Energy, and Business Affairs. But among the 175 interstate oil pipelines, three earned more than 30 percent, three more earned more than 40 percent and apipeline owned by Sunoco made an astounding 55 percent.

One reason they did so well is that you paid these pipelines for corporate income taxes, both federal and state. Problem is, most pipelines do not pay the corporate income tax. That means the taxes you were forced to pay - but that never got passed on to government - were really just extra profits.

How do you pay this tax? You won't find it cited anywhere on a bill you get. Looking at your utility bills and gas station receipts, you would never know that the federal government lets pipeline owners drill a hole in your pocketbook. But if natural gas warms your home, if you use electricity that comes from a generation plant that burns gas, or you drive a car fueled by gasoline, chances are the fuels travel via monopoly pipelines, meaning you paid your piece.

If you have never heard about this tax-gouging rule, that's not surprising. The major news media have missed it completely. News outlets rarely cover FERC. When they do, the stories tend to be superficial and based on press releases. Without a watchdog to watch, much less bark, how are you to know you're being ripped off by an entire industry? The way this rule came about is a perfect example of how big companies use the fine print of regulations to enrich themselves unfairly at your expense.

THE PIPELINE PROFIT

Pipelines collect all of their revenues from their customers, the energy companies that produce fuels and natural gas. The money they collect pays their costs, from pipeline operations to expense-account lunches; what's left over becomes profits for investors. Since there is no competitive market to determine prices, government regulators stand in for market forces. In theory, the FERC holds hearings, gathers evidence, scrutinizes accounting records and then determines the prices, or rates, that can be charged for moving oil and gas through America's more than five hundred thousand miles of transport pipelines.

A simple legal principle - "just and reasonable" - is supposed to guide this process. On one side of the equation, investors are entitled to reasonable costs and a reasonable profit so that the business is viable and the service reliable. On the other, customers are entitled to just and reasonable prices so that they pay what they would in a competitive market.

Historically, calculations of what is "just and reasonable" were made on the basis of money actually spent. But FERC had a better idea: it decided you can be charged for fictional expenses, not just actual ones. The real world of costs and prices once defined the limits, but with fiction, there are no boundaries.

This shift to picking your pocket rather than settling for "just and reasonable" rates based on actual expenses began with a provision in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, which passed Congress with bipartisan support and which President Reagan signed. Many excellent aspects of that law looked to make the tax system fairer, but the legislation also harbored hundreds of subtle favors to industries and individuals. One provision - the one that, in time, would allow charging for fictional costs - didn't make the news. But it changed the way that partnerships, specifically master limited partnerships, are treated under the tax law.

Before 1986, any partnership allowing its shares to trade like a stock was subject to corporate income tax. That meant the partnership might as well organize as a corporation, in which the company is taxed on profits and then its owners are taxed again on dividends and gains on shares sold at a profit. This is known as the double taxation of corporate profits. But the 1986 law allowed shares of "master limited partnerships" to trade just like stocks, only without the partnership being subject to the corporate income tax. Investors in a master limited partnership, or MLP, escape double taxation because they pay only one level of tax, their personal income taxes, on profits.

Historically, corporations owned pipelines. But once the 1986 law changed, so did the structure of the pipeline business. Many corporations created master limited partnerships and put their pipelines into them. Nearly two hundred master limited pipeline partnerships existed by 2012.

With the resulting elimination of the corporate income tax, you might think that monopoly pipeline rates would go down. After all, their costs went down by the amount of the corporate income tax once it was eliminated for MLPs. And since only actual expenses are supposed to be considered when regulators set "just and reasonable" rates, then rates, in theory, should decline.

Yet, even in the absence of a corporate income tax, FERC permitted master limited pipeline partnerships to include a charge for corporate income taxes in their rates. The organization that represents the owners and developers of natural gas wells, the Natural Gas Supply Association, objected. It said that including fictitious taxes in pipeline charges amounted to an "under the table" rate increase. Consumer groups, few and lightly funded, let the issue slide.

From the point of view of a pipeline monopolist, charging customers the corporate income tax and then pocketing the money makes an already lucrative business extraordinarily profitable. Court records from a test case that challenged the nonexistent tax that one oil pipeline charged show just how much. For each dollar of after-tax profit earned under the old system of actual costs, pipeline owners could now pocket $1.75. That 75 percent boost in after-tax profits came out of the consumer's pocket.

The pipeline that first got approval to charge the nonexistent tax is called the SFPP. Its name comes from the initials of the former Santa Fe and Southern Pacific railroads, which merged a quarter century ago. During the one-term administration of George H. W. Bush, the first Texas oilman to become president, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission let this pipeline charge rates that assumed it paid a 42.7 percent corporate income tax on profits. Two of the pipeline's wholesale customers, BP (British Petroleum) West Coast and ExxonMobil, appealed FERC's approval of the fictional tax to the federal district court of appeals in Washington, which hears challenges to regulatory actions.

The court reversed FERC's decision. Judge David B. Sentelle and two colleagues held that regulators "cannot create a phantom tax in order to create an allowance to pass through to the ratepayer." Monopoly rates set by government cannot include "phantom income taxes [the MLP] did not pay." The court ruled that under the "just and reasonable" rule, including a nonexistent tax was, in short, inherently unjust and unreasonable.

That might have been the end of it. But by the time that case was decided a former oil and gas tax-shelter salesman, George W. Bush, had become president. His administration hustled to remake the regulatory landscape to the liking of the energy industry, especially Enron, which had been Bush's single largest source of campaign funds. His vice president, Dick Cheney, had created a secretive advisory panel that put forth energy policy proposals which, years later, were revealed to be almost word for word what Enron and other energy companies proposed. And which companies pushed hard for these new rules to include fictional corporate tax expenses in monopoly pipeline rates? Enron and Kinder Morgan Management, a pipeline company headed by a former Enron president.

Cheney's point man regarding pipeline regulations was a career regulator named Joseph Kelliher. He must have done a reliable job for Cheney because in 2003 Kelliher got a promotion to FERC commissioner. In 2005, President Bush promoted Kelliher again, this time to FERC chairman.

Kelliher and other Bush appointees wanted to restore the fake tax that Judge Sentelle struck down. They also wanted the matter resolved - and avoid years of regulatory litigation - before someone less in the pocket of the oil industry got to the White House or Admiral's House, where the vice president lives. A clever trick made things move quickly. FERC announced in 2005 it would develop a "policy statement" on whether to include "actual or potential" taxes in pipeline rates.

Most legal matters in America involve administrative and regulatory law. The regulatory system, however, doesn't ordinarily recognize "policy statements," only formal rule making. But by creating this regulatory twilight zone, the commission effectively suspended the rules on making rules. When the rules are in effect and a case is under way, private meetings between commissioners and parties to cases, such as pipeline lobbyists, are generally prohibited. Lawyers call these meetings "ex parte" - from one side only-because other parties are excluded, making the meetings inherently unfair and one-sided.

But in the invented world of "policy statements," no such limitation existed. Kelliher and other commissioners could, and did, meet privately with pipeline lobbyists while giving little or no time to those who did not share their inclination to allow pipelines to charge for nonexistent taxes.

The Bush appointees' fealty to the pipeline industry ran deep. Once they had heard all they wanted from pipeline lobbyists and lawyers, they allowed only a brief opportunity for comments on the not-yet-issued "policy statement." As for the customary practice of letting parties respond to what their opponents say, that went out the window. Each side was given only a few days to file, and no rebuttals were allowed before FERC adopted the policy statement. Then in 2007, Kelliher and the other commissioners relied on the policy statement in approving new rates for the SFPP, the same pipeline controlled by Kinder Morgan that had been the subject of the earlier federal appeals court decision. These new rates included the corporate tax even though, as a master limited partnership, SFPP was exempt from corporate income taxes.

This decision on the added tax was more than a little odd because the second President Bush had pledged never to raise taxes. Bush signed a no-more-taxes pledge much stronger than what Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform bullied many other politicians into signing. "If elected president," Bush wrote to Norquist in 1999, "I will oppose and veto any increase in individual or corporate marginal income tax rates or individual or corporate income tax hikes." Since no major news organization covered the FERC beat, the broken pledge went unreported. Even so, it's a truism that even if a tax falls in the forest of Washington regulations and no one reports it, the tax is still there.

Technically, one could argue that the pipeline rule that makes you pay other people's income taxes does not violate the presidential pledge. That tortured reasoning runs this way: the rule does not raise your marginal tax rates or hike taxes, it just makes you pay a tax that the law does not impose.

After the Bush administration put the "tax" back in place, ExxonMobil and other oil companies that shipped their products through the 2,700-mile SFPP pipeline filed new challenges. Based on the earlier decision, it looked like an open-and-shut case since nothing substantive had changed. A fake expense was still included in monopoly pipeline rates, and Judge Sentelle had said that was not allowed.

This time Judge Sentelle, joined by judges Thomas Griffith and Brett Kavanaugh, took a different view. The decision made it dear that they disliked FERC's new policy of imposing fake taxes, as the judges suggested that ignoring taxes altogether in setting rates might be a good idea, certainly a better idea than including nonexistent taxes in rates. They wrote that rates based on a fictional corporate income tax charge "and the policy statement upon which they are based incorporate some of the troubling elements of the phantom tax ... disallowed in" the earlier SFPP pipeline case.

But their decision then took an unexpected turn. Judge Sentelle and his colleagues ruled that chairman Kelliher and the rest of the commission had "justified its new policy with reasoning sufficient to survive our review." How did the appeals court stand its earlier decision on its head? Judge Sentelle wrote that it was not the court's place to decide what regulation was best or smart, but only to make sure it was "not arbitrary or capricious or contrary to law." This was the same legal reasoning that permits monopoly railroads to charge customers like the Lafayette Utilities System in Louisiana a monopoly price for hauling coal 1,520 miles when there are parallel tracks for all but 20 miles of that journey. Whatever the flaws in the FERC's reasoning, Judge Sentelle said, the fake tax could be charged to customers. He and his confreres made no mention of two obvious and essential questions: How can any fictional expense be fair to customers? And how can any fake cost be "just and reasonable"?

In California, SFPP sought to impose the same corporate tax charge for oil it moves within the state. There, rates are regulated by the state Public Utilities Commission. An administrative law judge who heard evidence in that case, which began in 1997, issued a proposed ruling denying any allowance for a fake tax. But late in 2010 Commissioner Timothy Alan Simon put out an alternative decision that included the tax. Simon, who was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, is a securities lawyer who worked for investment firms engaged with energy businesses.

What happened next shows how a spotlight, even a small one, focused on government can produce positive change. I wrote a column about Simon's proposal to impose this tax in State Tax Notes, a small public policy magazine; the column was also posted at tax. com, its sister Web site. That prompted several people to notify the commission that they wanted to speak about it during the next public comment period. Rather than hear them, the commission put off the vote. Six months later, with Simon gone, the commission rejected the proposed fake tax.

The amount of money at stake was small, about $9 million per year or twenty-five cents per resident. But that one brief article and the action of readers who asked that their voices be heard will save Californians that $9 million, inflation adjusted, which should give heart to those trying to make government more responsive to people and less friendly to corporations.

The money taken from you by all of America's pipelines together is too small to be worth any individual putting up a fight. I estimate the chrge for this nonexistent tax comes to about $3 billion a year, which is about $20 annually per American household, something like a nickel a day. But to the two hundred monopoly pipelines that stand to benefit, it is a lot of money, enough to justify huge spending on campaign contributions, lobbyists and litigation.

Unless consumers rise up and fight this, one thing is certain: unelected officials, backed by judges with lifetime appointments, will authorize and then approve more ways to pick your pocket because of what judges Sentelle, Griffith and Kavanaugh did. In a clear miscarriage of economic justice, they destroyed the legal principle that "just and reasonable" rates rest on actual costs, at least for pipelines. This fake tax may be extended to other utilities and to the railroads. Achieving this requires only a simple change in federal law. All that would be required is the insertion of a list of industries that can be owned through publicly traded master limited partnerships without being subject to the corporate income tax.

A prominent regulatory lawyer and former chief counsel for FERC told me he expects that is what will happen. Gordon Gooch joined FERC as a young lawyer, after clerking for a Supreme Court justice, and rose to become FERC's general counsel. Later, as a private lawyer representing ExxonMobil, he lost the case in which Judge Sentelle allowed fake taxes to be added as a cost in pipeline rates.

Gooch says that corporate-owned electric utilities are salivating at the prospect of getting out of paying corporate income tax while pocketing the money. Their trade association has already defended collecting income taxes from customers, monies that are never turned over to government. The industry trade association Edison Electric Institute basically said its members just do what the law allows. "The electric utilities would be master limited partnerships now," Gooch said, "except that when the law was changed in 1986 the Edison Electric Institute was uncharacteristically asleep at the switch."

If Congress amends the law, or some creative judicial interpretation effects such a change, then the cost to consumers of this fake tax would soar. Instead of being a nickel per day, each family of four could be hit for more than a dollar a day, and $400 annually for a family of four is real money. It is the weekly after-tax pay for a single worker at the median wage in 2010.

How many other rules like this one benefit the heavily subsidized energy industry but lie buried beneath layers of legalese? The answer is: plenty. Just ask Calvin Johnson, a professor of tax law at the University of Texas, who has devoted years to uncovering hidden tax favors. Hidden in the legal and regulatory fine print Johnson found an astonishing profits booster for independent oil and gas companies. They get extra dollop after extra dollop of tax breaks on top of the thick layers of official favors the energy industry already enjoys.

Consider two companies, each of which earns a 10 percent pretax return in the market, but one of which is an independent oil and gas company. Johnson showed how energy industry tax rules create an additional profit of 41 percent. The independent oil and gas company investors will earn 14.1 percent instead of the market profit of 10 percent.

Johnson and others disclosed their findings through the Shelf Project, which is published in State Tax Notes. Its goal is to show ways that Congress could raise more money just by closing loopholes, fixing flaws in tax laws, and undoing unjust decisions like Judge Sentelle's shameless gift to pipeline MLPs. So far Johnson and his colleagues have shown how Congress, by closing loopholes, could raise $1 trillion each year without any new taxes or tax rate increases. That would be enough to nearly balance the federal budget in 2013.

After the election of Barack Obama, FERC chairman Kelliher decided it was time to leave. But before going, he found one more way to gouge our wallets. During the first week of 2009 Kelliher announced that on Inauguration Day he would step down as chairman of FERC but stay on as a commissioner. He also announced that he would recuse himself from FERC business because he would be meeting with energy companies the commission regulates to "explore other career opportunities." In other words, Kelliher hung around for two months doing no work, but collecting a paycheck until he got a new job. Kelliher's new post? He became an executive in charge of the regulatory team at what is now NextEra Energy, a holding company that owns Florida Power & Light and, yes - you guessed it - pipelines.

David Cay Johnston "Free Lunch" (2007)

Prison Conditions

This same lack of accountability helps explain other prison policies that have the effect of undermining public safety. Consider the physical location of prisons. Individuals are often locked away far from their homes with more than 75% of people incarcerated more than 50 miles away from home and the average person 100 miles away These distances make it difficult for family and friends to visit, particularly those who struggle to afford transportation to the facilities. One study found that fewer than half of all people imprisoned less than 50 miles away receive visits at least once a month, and the number declines as the distances increases, with only about one-quarter of the people incarcerated more than 100 miles away receiving monthly visits. In Florida, for example, the majority of people are never visited while they are in prison; 58% were never visited in the year prior to their release. Those who do receive visits are much less likely to recidivate when they are released. People incarcerated in state prisons in Florida who had visitors had a 30.7% lower incidence of recidivism than those who did not. Significantly, for each additional visit an individual received, the odds of recidivism declined by 3.8%.

It is not just distance that matters for visits. It is up to each state whether it wants to impose restrictions on prison visits, and the states can consider any penological goal, not just the effect on public safety. Courts usually defer to prison administrators in making these determinations. The result is that many correctional facilities have limited visits as disciplinary measures or for other cost-saving or administrative reasons, such as preventing the transfer of contraband. Visitation policies in maximum-security prisons are often the most restrictive, even though the individuals housed there are likely the ones who need the most help and support for successful reentry. In North Carolina, for instance, prisoners in maximum security can have only one visit per week for two hours. In Oklahoma maximum-security prisoners have up to four hours a week of visitation, while minimum-security prisons allow eight hours. While tightening visitation might aid the administration of the facility, it is a terrible policy if the goal is to reduce crime because maintaining connections with loved ones is critical for an individual's successful reentry. Studies consistently show that visitation reduces and delays recidivism.

Visits should be in-person to have the greatest benefit, but many states are now turning to video visits instead to save administrative costs. To be sure, virtual visitation programs are useful when an individual is incarcerated far from their loved ones or when in-person visitation may be dangerous. But video calls should not replace in-person visits in most cases because virtual visitation does not produce the same strong communal and familial ties that are demonstrated to change individuals' behavior both in and out of prison. Video calls are often interrupted by technical difficulties, and prisoners do not have the same privacy and intimacy that in-person visits afford. Video visitation can also have negative effects on the prisoner's loved ones. Seeing someone on a screen does not provide the same reassurance about his or her well-being as does an in-person visit.106 Despite these negative effects on reentry and ultimately public safety, some jail and prison administrators are nevertheless replacing in-person visits with video visits because it makes their jobs easier, even if the general public pays the price in terms of inferior reentry outcomes.

Facilities often adopt similarly counterproductive telephone policies. The rates for phone calls are often exorbitant because pay phone companies have a monopoly on calls to and from the facilities, and the fees are split between those companies and the prisons and jails. A 4-minute call costs as much as $56. Prisons and jails go along because they reap revenue from this setup, collectively making around $460 million per year in concession fees from the companies. The people incarcerated and their families bear a crushing burden as a result. A retired nurse who spent $100 per month just to talk to her grandson who was in prison in another state brought a civil rights challenge to this structure and pointed out how hard it was on families and the people in prison, many of whom are living in poverty. In 20I5, the FCC implemented rate caps for interstate and intrastate prison calls, but in June 20I7, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the intrastate caps as beyond the agency's legal authority. Roughly 80% of prison phone calls are intrastate, so without FCC regulation, states would have to regulate the rates to keep costs down. But all too often that does not happen, and the result is that calls remain prohibitively expensive. It is not just those in prison and their loved ones who suffer. The public loses out as well because a valuable tool for reentry goes underutilized because the financial interests of the phone companies and the prisons cut against the public interest in getting better post-incarceration outcomes.

There is a similar tension - or at least a perceived tension - in the use of solitary confinement. Many prison administrators believe it is critical to be able to use it to maintain control of difficult individuals in their facilities and to keep their employees and other incarcerated individuals safe. Almost 20% of people in prisons and 18% of people in jails reported spending time in solitary, and the figures are even higher for individuals with a history of mental health problems. President Obama noted that "as many as 100,000 inmates in U.S. prisons are currently held in solitary confinement" and that "as many as 25,000 are in long-term solitary confinement, which involves months if not years with almost no human contact." The effects of solitary confinement on individuals when they are released from prison are devastating. Solitary confinement can produce psychological consequences that outlast the period of confinement and increase the risk of violent recidivism.

Even if separation is necessary to maintain order in some cases, the use of solitary confinement goes well beyond necessity. Many people are placed in solitary because of relatively minor disruptive behavior, such as talking back or failing to obey an order! Before a policy change, corrections officers sent people in South Carolina to solitary confinement for an average of 12 days for violating prison protocol by posting on social-media sites. in 2013, a person was sent to solitary for 37 1/2 years for posting on Facebook 38 times. The conditions of separation also often go far beyond a safety rationale. There is no safety reason, for example, for rules that prevent individuals in solitary confinement from having pictures of their family members or newspapers. Nor is there a prison management reason for facilities to be designed such that individuals in isolation have no access to windows. One former warden of the nation's only supermax facility, ADX Florence, admitted as much in an interview, noting, "This place is not designed for humanity .... When it's 23 hours a day in a room with a slit of a window where you can't even see the Rocky Mountains - let's be candid here. It's not designed for rehabilitation. Period. End of story."

Rachel Barkow " Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration" (2019)

While Richard's nights were spent in search of the perpetual party, his days were soon spent performing a sharply ironic role, as the confidant of a great artist destroying herself through drugs. When he was first cast in Lady Sings the Blues, the glossy biopic of jazz singer Billie Holiday, his part had exactly one scene and one line. He was the piano player who, after a young Billie fumbles an audition as a dancer, implores the exasperated nightclub owner to try her out as a singer: "Hey Jerry, give the girl a chance." It was a thin role, but Richard projected a personality onto it, modeling his character after Jimmy Binkley, the upbeat jazz pianist he'd known at Collins Corner a decade before, in Peoria. He cocked his fedora at a rakish angle and, when the cameras rolled, gave his line a wry topspin.

The gambit worked. Lady producer Jay Weston recalled that Richard delivered his single line "in such a funny, drawling way that when we looked at the dailies that night, someone said, 'Let's keep him in the scene tomorrow, where she sings her number.' " Given more room in the scene, Richard improvised a stream of patter on camera - "You've never heard ['All of Me'] like this. Church! Take you home! " - with a spieling delivery that the Village Voice's Andrew Sarris later called "mumbly-magical."

The movie's creative team set about revising the script as the film was being shot. The originally nondescript "piano man" became Billie's best friend "Piano Man," and his scenes gradually expanded to a third of the film. His death at the hands of two drug dealers - with Billie looking on, powerless - became, astonishingly, the movie's emotional climax, the event that sends her into a final tailspin. Richard ended up the third-billed star on the picture, just beneath Diana Ross and Billie Dee Williams, its two romantic leads.

Richard was glad to pick up the extra work. Signed originally for five hundred dollars, he started receiving multiples of that amount every day to improvise in tandem with Diana Ross and develop his character in real time. The two found a groove, both of them stretching outside their comfort zone - singing for Ross, stand-up for Richard - and seizing the chance to act. "We became real close," remembered. "Every day, it wasn't a job. We just worked totally easily."

In his scenes Richard was, alone among the film's actors, given the freedom to ad-lib his entire performance, and the character who emerged from that improv was both the Jimmy Binkley facsimile he originally intended and much more. Quick with a quip, his Piano Man brought out the earthy humor of the jazz world. After Billie shuddered at the sight of nightclub singers using their private parts to pick up tips from customers, Piano Man jibed about one performer:

"Don't worry about her - what she misses on the top, she picks up on bottom. One day she picked up the tabletop." When put in the of toasting Billie on the happy occasion of her anniversary at the he took the opportunity to roast the club owner:

"We got old cheapie to spring for something. Everything's beautiful. He even paid the band since you been here. A beautiful year! Look at the girls, look at their uniforms. Even the hos are making money!"

Without Richard's Piano Man, Lady Sings the Blues would have had no leavening agent; the down-home humor of Billie Holiday's world would have been sacrificed on the altar of the film's high production values.

Yet Richard may have left his greatest imprint by adding a layer of emotional and ethical complexity to a film that put forward as its moral hero, Billie's husband Louis McKay (a choice much disputed by those familiar with the real-life Billie, who wrote, of the men in her life, "I was as strong, if not stronger, than any of them") As played by Billie Dee Williams, McKay was magnetic and suave, a do-right man who aimed to steer Billie from away from drugs and toward a conventional family life. The movie's villains, like the masked southern Klansmen who ram an American flag through the window of Billie's tour bus, were drawn with a similarly broad brush.

As long as Richard's Piano Man was alive and on-screen, he stood for a middle way between the hero-villain poles of this melodrama. His attitude - hip, sympathetic, vulnerable - suggested that it was possible to live with the struggles of Billie Holiday and not be ensnared or defeated by them. Usually Billie looked pathetic when high on drugs - slack-jawed and slumped in a bathroom, say, her hair a mess. With Piano Man, she found a disjointed camaraderie in her high. In the scene in which they take heroin together, the dialogue is loose:

BILLIE HOLIDAY' Hey, you know what?
PIANO MAN' Chicken butt!
[Billie sings "God Bless the Child" while Piano Man accompanies her on harmonica.]
BILLIE: You got your own harmonica. [Rubbing her nose] I got my own harmonica.
PIANO MAN. I got my own high, too.

The scene doesn't glamorize drug use, but neither does it condemn it. It's a scene of release for Billie and Piano Man - from everyday pressures, from logic, from the burden of performing for watchful eyes. Eventually there will be hell to pay - the dealers come after Piano Man, who has stolen the heroin for Billie, and beat him senseless - but in the moment, the drug offers Billie and Piano Man exactly what they're looking for.

Here and in other scenes, Richard's improvisations played into the hidden strengths of director Sidney Furie, who, before impressing Hollywood with the hit spy thriller The Ipcress File (1965), helmed The Leather Boys (1964), a gritty treatment of England's gay biker subculture. Piano Man's last three scenes with Billie Holiday felt almost as if they belonged to a different film, something closer to The Leather Boys than a mainstream musical biopic like Funny Girl: the scenes were open to emotional confusions and seemed as if they might go in any number of directions as they played themselves out. They were intriguingly off-balance, like the character Richard improvised into existence.

Despite Richard's achievement as an actor in Lady, there was a hall-of-mirrors quality to his playing Piano Man at this moment in his life. On-screen he was the addict's boon companion, hip and sweet. He'd shaved off his moustache and beard for the part, and looked again like the Cosby wannabe of 1965. Offscreen he was the addict himself, and in danger of falling into the same self-sabotaging traps that Lady largely warned against. One day on set, as the crew waited for Richard to perform the scene where Piano Man is beaten to death for stealing drugs for Billie, Richard shut himself in his trailer and wouldn't come out; he was incapable of being the consummate professional. According to producer Jay Weston, Berry Gordy broke the impasse by relaying a curt message to Richard through a production assistant: "Tell him if he doesn't come out right now, I will take a baseball bat and break his knee." Fortunately, Richard came out of his trailer - and performed the scene flawlessly. A perfectly happy ending: Richard avoiding a beat-down in real life by taking a beat-down in front of the cameras.

But Richard's addiction threatened others beside him. The night before shooting his scenes, he typically partied - drinking heavily, doing drugs - until three or four in the morning, waving away the fact that the Motown Productions limousine was set to arrive just a few hours later at his home, a former gardener's cottage on the grounds of Yamashiro, a jewel of a Japanese restaurant set in the Hollywood Hills. Day after day, when the limo pulled up, he was dead asleep, unwakeable.

One morning after a late-night card game, Patricia tried to rouse him.

"Bitch, if you touch me one more motherfucking time," Richard said, "I'm going to beat the shit out of you."

"The car is here," Patricia pleaded. "Richard, please."

Richard punched her in the face, and Patricia ran off, leaving the limo driver to handle him.

A half day later, he returned home from the day's shoot. Patricia was wearing a bandage on her nose; one of her eyes was bruised a shade of black.

"Who fuckin' did this to you?" Richard shouted. "I'll kill the motherfucker!"

Scott Saul "Becoming Richard Pryor" (2014)

She watched with eyes as wide as her colleagues' when Robbins dispatched her and the others to wedding parties through Dvora Lapson. Everett and Migenes tried to blend in among the women at a grand affair at the Ansonia Hotel one hot night, conversing with vague "um hmms" and silent nods for fear of being revealed as interlopers. Merlin and Pendleton played participant-observers at weddings in Williamsburg in their respective gendered tribes, allowing themselves to get lost in the crowds of hundreds. As a self-described "goy from Ohio," Pendleton was amazed by everything: the groom stomping on a glass, the couple raised up in chairs, the hours of raucous dancing - and astonished more by the transference of the joyous ritual into a staged scene that he would eventually play night after night with genuine, brimming emotion.

Educating the cast mattered enormously to Robbins, but the improvisations and table talk served another function, too: as delaying tactics. Robbins was both the most prepared director anyone had ever worked with and also the most insecure, especially when it came to scene work. He simply didn't know how to talk to actors. He'd blurt out Actors Studio words like "motivation" and "justification" and urge his cast to find their "inner reality," but he couldn't articulate any thoughts about the specific emotional lives of the characters. So he concentrated on the behavior. Obsessively.

But Robbins knew, as a week of rehearsal was flying by, that no matter how much he dreaded the process, he had to get the actors up. He started by staging the early scene where the daughters set the table for the Sabbath and Tzeitel and Motel end up having a private conversation in which she urges him to speak to her father about their desire to marry each other, while he helps her lay down a tablecloth and then add dishes and candlesticks. The action is in the dialogue, the pretext in the business. But Robbins could deal only with the business - and he spent several precious hours on it one afternoon. By Pendleton's count, Robbins restaged the table setting twenty-five different ways: Put a plate down on this line. No, try it after that line. Maybe it would be better on the next line. Never mind, put the candlestick down instead. Not there, over two inches to the left. No. To the right. Switch places and try it again. Go faster. Try it slower. Let's go back to the first way. And so on, well into the night. Merlin and Pendleton grasped that Robbins wanted them to arrive at behavior that seemed effortless, just part of the reality of their characters' lives, but the wavering unnerved them. They had only just gotten started. Were they in for seven more weeks like this?

For the chorus, who joined the rehearsals in the third week, work ran more smoothly (at least at first). Robbins was at ease placing dancers on the stage and showing them their moves. And dancers, in turn, did not expect or need the coaxing and questioning that drew the best work from actors. They did as they were told, even when what Robbins told them deviated from any task they'd been given before. They weren't there to sing and dance, he explained; they were there as vital members of a community. He required all the ensemble members to conjure up character's and write their biographies. Food vendors, hatmakers, cobblers, street cleaners, embroiderers, water carriers: the research materials described many communal roles they could choose from. He mandated that they describe their ages, professions, temperaments, and relationships to everyone else in the town. One night Robbins assembled the entire company to show them Ghetto Pillow and Through Tears. And a large group of the chorus, too, made a field trip to a Brooklyn wedding.

When Zero Mostel blasted into rehearsals after the second week he started ridiculing Robbins right away. "A couple of weddings in Williamsburg and that putz thinks he understands Orthodox Jews!" he'd snort with a roll of the eyes that seemed to trace the full circumference of the globe. Mostel vied for power with everything he had - comic charm, deep personal knowledge of Yiddishkayt, colossal talent, sheer volume and size - but always indirectly. Like an overgrown class clown, he shared his jibes in naughty asides to other actors. He never confronted Robbins directly, but he baited him. One day, every time Robbins turned his back, Mostel shook his ample behind at him. The next day he carried out the same routine, only this time he gave Robbins the finger, On another occasion, when Robbins insisted Mostel stop chomping on chewing gum during rehearsals, the actor stuck the gum behind his ear and popped it back into his mouth and began gnawing lustily when Robbins looked away. Once he tromped across the back of the stage with a bucket on his foot while Robbins was talking to other actors. Day after day he found a. way to entertain his fellow cast members at the director's expense. And most of the company - especially the younger actors - cheered him on with their laughter. The more one feared Robbins, it seemed, the more one appreciated Mostel's pokes at his authority - and the prospect that Robbins feared Mostel.

Robbins silently endured Mostel's shenanigans. How hard he had to work to keep from blowing his stack, no one knew, but he never exploded - not at Mostel, anyway. He could be curt with Stein, barely looking up when the writer passed him the new pages he demanded. He could be cutting with actors - he called Everett "fatso," carped incessantly at a couple of chorus members (his "scapegoats," as they were known), and drove Bea Arthur off the stage in tears with an insult. But with Mostel, Robbins stayed businesslike. And if his own acting was involved, Mostel responded in kind. When both were concentrating on a scene, their working relationship simmered, in Stein's description, at "two degrees below hostile." Robbins put as genial a spin on their antagonism as he could when questioned by a journalist shortly after the show opened. "Mostel likes to test you when you work together," he said, removing some of the sting by generalizing with the second person. "There was a certain amount of squaring off at each other, but I think we both felt some good healthy respect beneath it all."

Robbins said little to Mostel by way of direction and that was plenty since Mostel, endlessly inventive, needed little prodding. When they argued at all, it was over substance, and often over Jewish substance. "What are you doing?" Robbins demanded at one rehearsal as Mostel touched the doorpost of Tevye's house and then brushed his fingers over his lips. Mostel offered the obvious answer: "I'm kissing the mezuzah." Robbins responded bluntly, "Don't do it again." But Mostel insisted that Tevye, like the Orthodox Jews with whom the actor had grown up, would never neglect to make the customary gesture of devotion that acknowledges the case of sacred parchment affixed to doorways of Jewish homes. Robbins bristled. Mostel held firm and kissed the mezuzah again. Without raising his voice - in fact, the more emphatic he became, the more firmly and calmly he spoke - Robbins demanded that Mostel stop. The actor relented. And then, when he walked through Tevye's doorway once more, he crossed himself. He'd made - and won - his point. The mezuzah kissing stayed in.

Less contentiously, Mostel deepened the Jewish texture of other elements of the show. When Bock and Harnick wrote "If I Were a Rich Man," they had been inspired by a mother-daughter duo they'd heard singing a Hasidic song at a benefit for the Hebrew Actors' Union. Bock went home with the song's harmonies of thirds and sixths in his ears and wrote the music for "Rich Man" that very night. For lyrics, Harnick began with the hero's fantasy in the first Tevye story in the Butwin volume, "The Bubble Bursts" (not otherwise dramatized in Fiddler), in which Tevye invests his entire savings with his speculating relative, who ends up squandering every cent. After handing over his "little hoard" in the story, Tevye has visions of "a large house with a tin roof right in the middle of the town," with a yard "full of chickens and ducks and geese." He sees his wife, Golde, as "a rich man's wife, with a double chin," who "strutted around like a peacock, giving herself airs and yelling at the servant girls." Earlier in the story, he imagines being wealthy enough to purchase a seat by the synagogue's eastern wall, build the synagogue a new roof, and take up other magnanimous works. Harnick shaped these fantasies to Bock's melody (including a verse, eventually cut, about dispensing charity) and elaborated them into a more complex version of a Broadway musical standard, the so-called I Want song. Typically, such a number comes early in the show and lets the protagonist tell the audience what she or he desires - for instance, Eliza's "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" in My Fair Lady or Rose's assertive "Some People" in Gypsy. "Rich Man" does the same, but only up to a point.

Where characters usually reveal the goal that motivates them - the driving force of the action to follow - Tevye expresses a flight of fancy, poignant for two differing reasons. First, both he and the audience know that he won't become wealthy and, anyway, that material riches don't truly motivate his actions. And second, audience members (of any ethnicity "beyond the melting pot") can tacitly recognize that they, the descendants of struggling ancestors, have fulfilled Tevye's idle dream. "Rich Man" instantly took the place of an earlier song the team had written for Tevye, a charming but less telling number about his recalcitrant horse. ("Matchmaker" is also a complicating variation on an I Want song: through singing it, the girls come to understand what they don't want. It replaced "To Marry for Love" - which pointed out how "love doesn't put a turnip on the table" - as Bock and Harnick reshaped the score around the capacities of the cast. The melodically simpler waltz, "Matchmaker," was easier for Everett and Merlin.)

Mostel could convey the ironic texture of "Rich Man" by heaving a heavy yet wistful sigh during the pauses built into the tune. No other actor could find as many layers and shades in an audible exhalation. Harnick gave him a chance to indulge in his hallmark faces and animal noises, too, by adding in lines about crossed eyes and the squawks made by those chicks and turkeys and geese.

But it was Mostel's religious background that enabled him to give the number its fullest dimension. Bock and Harnick had been especially impressed by the sound of particular passages in the Hebrew Actors Union performance and wanted to capture it in their song: the duo had burbled beautiful nonsense syllables. Harnick found it impossible to render such phonemes in prose, so he wrote down, "digguh-digguh-deedle-daidledum." When Bock and Harnick played the song for Mostel, he understood instantly what Harnick had been after and offered to "try something." "If I were a rich man," he began, and then, in place of the" digguh -digguh" phrase, he quietly emitted a soulful half-hummed, half-articulated incantation derived from the murmur of daily davening - a "dream-tasting spiral of Yiddish scat-syllables," as the critic Richard Gilman later described this tender, primal sound of yearning itself.

Meanwhile, Harnick worried that the song took too serious a turn.

He proposed cutting the verse in which Tevye dreams of the synagogue seat by the eastern wall and imagines how he'd "discuss the holy books with the learned men seven hours every day. / That would be the sweetest thing of all." Mostel protested. "If you change that," he boomed, "you don't understand this man." Harnick yielded, and said later, "He saved me from myself."

For all his goofing around at rehearsals, Mostel could switch instantly into a state of intense focus on the work. Other actors watched him in awe, spellbound by his freedom and self-confidence as a performer. He would try anything and never doubted himself. "He can do the same thing four ways," Stein remarked, "and they all seem right."

He became so totally absorbed in his character that, like a guru walking on hot coals, he shut down the distress signals being sent to his brain. In 1960, Mostel had exited a Manhattan bus on a January night and slipped on the icy pavement. The bus ran him over, crushing and mangling his left leg. After five months in the hospital and four complicated operations, he was spared the amputation that had originally been recommended, but he lived in a state of severe, perpetual pain and walked with a cane - except onstage. The moment he came off, the agony rushed in. Tanya Everett or his dresser, Howard Rodney, would bring him swaths of cloth that had been drenched in water and put in a freezer, to apply to his leg after a performance.

Mostel's injury made his unlikely gracefulness all the more astounding. At a bulky 230 pounds when he played Tevye, he treaded lightly and could even appear dainty. Robbins compared him to "a bagful of water [that] has gotten up and started to float around." For a man without formal movement training, he had exceptional control. Robbins exploited it in the first big number he staged, "L'Chaim," the celebration at the inn after Tevye assents to Lazar Wolfs proposal to marry Tzeitel. Working on this scene had to be one of the occasions when the friction between Mostel and Robbins was superseded by their brilliance, each man recognizing - and feeding - the creativity of the other.

To Bock and Harnick, "L'Chaim" was simply a song. But Robbins saw much more in it: an opportunity for bringing together Russians and Jews, exploring their long-standing animosity and opening up, then closing, the possibility of rapport-all through dance. He divided the male corps into the two groups, putting, as one of them remembered, "the butchest dancers in the Jewish roles." Despite looking tougher, however, those playing Jews were told to keep their movement small and contained at first, to express a physical submissiveness when Russians are around. "Keep it all inside," Robbins instructed, as he showed them their celebratory steps: they hold up their arms, elbows bent at right angles, and clasp hands with the men on either side, and, thus lined up, snake through the inn. When Russians unexpectedly leap into the revelry, they slap their feet in a set of rhythmic steps, perform jumping splits, vault over the furniture, kick their legs, and generally dash about. They are the masters of the universe, Robbins explained, and their boisterousness, though friendly in this instance, threatens the Jews.

Alisa Solomon "Wonder of Wonders" (2013)

Reentry and vocational training programs are also effective. Consider, for instance, EMPLOY, a prisoner reentry employment program run by the Minnesota Department of Corrections, which has been shown to decrease recidivism and increase employment for program participants. The program, which participants begin within the final few months of their prison term and conclude one year after their release, reduced the likelihood of reincarceration for a new crime by 55% and increased the likelihood of securing employment within a year of release by 72%. Or take the case of the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program, a federal initiative that allows private industries to employ individuals in prison in realistic work environments and helps them acquire marketable skills, all while being paid prevailing local wages for that line of work. The program not only reduces recidivism but also helps incarcerated individuals accrue savings and payoff any money owed for victim cornpensation.

Vocational training programs such as these are critical because individuals are more likely to commit new crimes if they remain unemployed upon release, and employment is hard to come by for formerly incarcerated people. One study of post-release employment outcomes among individuals in Indiana found that, of the more than 6,000 people tracked, roughly 94% remained unemployed nine months following their release, and 78% of these same individuals remained unemployed even five years later.

Drug treatment programs have also been found to reduce both recidivism and relapse into drug abuse. A 2012 meta-analysis of 74 studies evaluating incarceration-based drug treatment programs over the past 30 years found that, on average, participants in a treatment program had a 15% to I7% reduced likelihood of both recidivism and relapse. And some incarceration-based treatment programs exceed those average results. Participants in the Forever Free Substance Abuse Treatment Program at the California Institution for Women in Frontera, for example, had a 20% reduced likelihood of recidivating compared to similarly situated nonparticipants, enjoyed a I6% increased likelihood of employment, were 26% less likely to have reported drug use in the year since their release, and had a greater likelihood of living independently and maintaining custody of their children.

Unfortunately, prison programs are woefully underfunded .and do not come close to meeting the needs of those who are incarcerated. Indeed, the percentage of individuals participating in vocational, educational, and drug treatment programs declined in the 1990s while incarceration rates were going through the roof, demonstrating that jurisdictions were investing in longer sentences but not the programming that would ultimately bring public safety benefits when these individuals were released. One study of prison programming in seven states found that less than 10% of the people who were incarcerated took part in educational, employment, or vocational programming.

To be sure, many people in prison are participating in a work program, but the majority are performing jobs to support the functioning of the prison, such as food preparation or janitorial work, which impart few marketable skills and do not improve the person's employment prospects upon release. The vocational training that works best to help individuals when they leave prison is in short supply. For example, UNICOR, the vocational program run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons which affords participants experience in carpentry, electronics, automotive repair, and other marketable trades, has a waiting list of 25,000 people and a meager 8% participation rate, despite the fact that participating in UNlCOR reduces recidivism by 24%.

Education offerings in prison similarly fall well short of reaching all the needs of those in prison. An estimated 40% of people in state and federal prisons have neither a high school diploma nor a GED, but many of these individuals need more than a GED-prep course, which tends to be the standard offering in facilities. More than 20% of state and federal prisoners and more than 30% of people in jail have at least one "cognitive disability" (examples of which include autism, learning disorders, attention deficit disorder, Down syndrome, and dementia), compared to just 5% of the general population. Few facilities offer any kind of educational programming tailored to the needs of these individuals. Prisons also rarely offer the kind of basic education that many of the people in prison need even when they do not have cognitive disabilities. A recent study of more than 200 individuals in a medium security prison in Alabama, for example, found that among the African American and Latino population in the prison, the average grade level for reading was sixth and third grade, respectively. Yet few facilities offer remedial education for individuals at this reading level. Most pre-GED courses are designed for those who are reading between a sixth- and eighth-grade-level equivalent.

Rachel Barkow " Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration" (2019)

His life had been one of achieving "firsts" for African Americans. He had been a pioneer in interracial relations in an era before many people spoke in terms of a civil rights movement. Many of his racial breakthroughs have been forgotten amid the accelerating pace of the civil rights movement in the second half of the century, but in terms of breaking down racial barriers, Pollard's accomplishments were self-evident. In 1916, he became the first man of his race to be named to a backfield position on the mythical All-America team named by Walter Camp. At the time, the former Yale coach called Pollard "one of the greatest runners these eyes have ever seen." Some football expects, including Wallace Wade, Pollard's former teammate and later a successful collegiate coach, ranked him ahead of Red Grange as a college halfback. The winter before his All-America season, Pollard had been the first black to play in the Rose Bowl. As a professional, Pollard was instrumental in integrating what by 1922 would become the National Football League. Those in the crowd who had heard Pollard's name mentioned in recent years perhaps knew that he was the first black head coach in the NFL. Few remembered that he was the first of his race to play quarterback in the now well-established professional football league. During his playing days, he also organized and coached the first all-black professional team and later returned to coaching in an unsuccessful effort to thwart the segregationist policy adopted by NFL owners in the 1930s. In 1954, Pollard was the first black named to the National Collegiate Football Hall of Fame, but inexplicably had been denied entrance into its professional counterpart in Canton, Ohio. Although the list of athletic firsts was impressive, few in the crowd in September 1978 could begin to appreciate the courage and determination it took for a young African American to confront and surmount racial barriers in a less tolerant America more than fifty years before. Racial slurs, physical abuse, and the humiliation of being denied dressing quarters, hotel accommodations, and access to restaurants and transportation had awaited Pollard at every turn. Although he had often understated the extent of the racial harassment he had endured, Pollard in later years admitted that he had been "niggerized" throughout his athletic career.

Yet, Pollard's pioneering endeavors did not end when his playing days were over. In the 1920s, he established what may have been the first all-black investment securities company in the country. The following decade Pollard ran the first African-American tabloid in New York City. In conjunction with his brother Luther, he had an early involvement in the making of all-black films during the World War I era. By the 1940s and 1950s, Pollard was one of a handful of African Americans who continued to produce black films. At the same time, he established himself as a leading black booking agent and was responsible for integrating scores of nightclubs that had previously barred African-American entertainers. During the 1940s, his Suntan Studios in Harlem was a training ground and springboard for scores of young black artists who sought careers in the entertainment world.

Pollard had accomplished much in eight-and-a-half decades, but most of the fans who saw the small, elderly man accept the engraved plaque knew little of Fritz Pollard or his courage and determination. The New York newspaper strike had curtailed advance publicity of the 1978 Young Award and seemed certain to limit national coverage of the award ceremony the following day. A few months earlier, the nationally syndicated sportswriter Jerry Izenberg had described Pollard as "a genuine unknown hero," lamenting that it was "a shame and a scandal" that "young people do not even know his name." Izenberg explained the oversight by pointing out that each generation regardless of race acts as if it "invented the games we play, the barriers we break and the hurdles we clear." Those who had seen Pollard play, however, never forgot the small, shifty halfback. John Sullivan, who as a teenager in the 1920s watched Pollard play for Gilberton in the rough and tumble Pennsylvania Coal Region, recalled that he was the fastest player he had ever seen, and opponents "did everything to injure him" because he was a college star and the only black man in the league. "He was a real pioneer," Sullivan concluded, "just like Jackie Robinson." Richard Lechner remembered that at age twelve or thirteen he would scale the fence and melt into the crowd at League Park in Akron, Ohio, to see the small but magical Pollard lead Akron against the legendary Jim Thorpe and the Canton Bulldogs. More than fifty years later, Lechner could still close his eyes and see the "Titanic struggles" between the two men as if they happened yesterday.

John Carroll "Fritz Pollard" (1992)

"My girl, she went a-golfing, and boy did she have fun / She her new silk stockings and got a hole in one."

Scott Saul "Becoming Richard Pryor" (2014)

The climax of the scene comes when, in the frenzy, a Russian bumps into Tevye. Everything pauses as the two glare at each other and, without moving, approach the precipice of a physical fight. Then the Russianplayed by Lorenzo Bianco-thrusts out a hand, inviting Tevye to dance with him. Here, Mostel's dexterity allowed him to be funny and piteous in a single moment and small gesture: slowly, he moves his pinky into Bianco's hand, expressing with just a finger Tevye's eagerness to trust his neighbor as well as his apprehension. In the instant their hands connect, Bianco flies into a toe-and-heel-tapping caper, and Mostel seems as if he will take flight. At half Mostel's girth, Bianco pulls him through the dance like a weightless kite and the men from both factions join in, their clashing styles meshing in the celebration not only of the engagement but now also of the rare and temporary suspension of hostilities. In a line, the Jews take small sideways steps and the Russians come bursting through between them, scooting along the floor on their knees and swooping in all directions. The number was a triumph for Robbins and for Mostel. The first time Prince saw it in rehearsal, he figured it wouldn't take long before he'd be sending checks to investors.

But as the work continued, Robbins didn't stage any more dancing.

Six weeks of rehearsal had gone by and the male dancers hadn't learned anything else; the women hadn't done anything at all. Robbins had wangled the unusually long eight-week rehearsal period by insisting he needed four as director of the actors and four as choreographer. So where were the rest of the dances? "Oh, I'll do them," Robbins said, with a nonchalant wave. Prince fumed quietly.

The members of the cast, too - especially the women - were beginning to wonder. They had learned and practiced the prologue's song, "Tradition," but as they entered their seventh week of rehearsals and the departure date for Detroit neared, Robbins still hadn't staged it. Given how tediously they'd labored over the simplest scenes, actors were getting nervous. At the rate Robbins was going, they figured he'd need at least a few days to put the opening number on its feet. And it wasn't going to be fun.

One day toward the end of the last week in New York, after the lunch break, Robbins clapped his hands and called the full chorus onto the stage (meanwhile, the principals were sent off to the lounge to work on their scenes with assistant director Richard Altman). He put the group in a line - young Roberta Senn at the lead - and told them to hold their arms up at a 90-degree angle and to link pinkies with the person on either side of them. His dance assistant, Tommy Abbott, helped show them what to do: maintaining their line, walk in from the stage-left wing, stepping on the downbeat of a four count, knees pulsing lightly, and circle the stage. Nothing could have been simpler. The variations flowed out of Robbins with an effortlessness that seemed casual: some performers were to shift their head position from left to right every four beats, some to turn around entirely. When the circle was complete, with all twenty-four performers onstage, the two positioned downstage center were to let go of each other's hands and lead their lines in opposite directions, heading upstage, walking underneath hand bridges formed by pairs of actors and coming to rest in two semicircles.

Robbins gave each group with a verse in the song - the papas, mamas, sons, and daughters - a series of defining movements to perform as they came downstage, in turn, to sing about their lives and obligations. Papas slap their chests with their right hands, point an index finger skyward, turn around with arms raised at 90 degrees, palms toward their faces, snapping their fingers. Mamas fold their hands on their stomachs, wipe their brows with the back of the right hand and thrust the hand toward the floor, walk toward the audience rolling their hands in a paddle-wheel motion. Robbins presented the sons with a little skipping crossover step and incorporated into their sequence a pensive hand to the cheek, a shrug, and the rhythmic swaying - the shukhel - of men's prayer. For the daughters, he assembled a couple of curtsies, some swaying motions of the arms, a series of side steps with a foot flexed and heel scuffing the floor: the moves combined an image of deference with a hint of mischief.

In less than two hours, the villagers learned their steps. "You're proud," Robbins told them as they got set to run the whole sequence from the top, this time with music. "You're very proud of your tradition." They straightened their spines. "All right," said Robbins. "Here ya go." Mostel picked up his opening speech toward the end: "And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word." The rehearsal pianist hit the opening chords, Mostel stomped his foot in time, threw his arms upward, and cried, "Tradition!" Out came the line of villagers, chins up, chests forward, spiraling onto the stage as they sang. From the house, Austin Pendleton (who wasn't in the number) was watching and what he saw forced him to change his own posture: he sat up and leaned forward with attention. Right away he grasped how tremendous the staging was. The steps were not complicated but the patterns were rich and meaningful: the cohesiveness of the circle, the abstracted gestures that distinguished each family member not only functionally but temperamentally, the vertical motions that connected the people to their God and to history. Most of all, Pendleton recognized that the number set forth the show's high stakes. "When the tradition gets repeatedly challenged in the course of the play," he marveled, "you'd know it's something huge. Jerry wanted the audience to feel that instantly. Now they would."

The performers felt it, too. A couple of hours earlier, they had been a cluster of theater gypsies, frayed and fearful, awaiting instruction from a man who could turn tyrant at the drop of a cue. Now, onstage at least, they were a community, elevated by the pride in their way of life. The scene wasn't completely finished that day. The song "accumulated" over time, as Jerry Bock later remarked. "It just kept rolling to a bigger moment." And Joe Stein would continue to weave more strands into the prologue "like a tapestry." He kept writing new lines-"a piece of dialogue here to introduce the rabbi, another to introduce Yente, others to introduce various other characters." Bock was adding layers to the music: toward the end of the song, all four separate groups sing their parts simultaneously in a folkish fugue that produces some surprising dissonant clashes that hint at the familial discord to come.

Even the unfussy staging would see some adjustments. Senn would have to relinquish her lead place in line to the dancer Mitch Thomas, and Peff Modelski would have to walk backward in her spot. Everyone's positioning and timing would have to be recalibrated once the floor contained an orbiting turntable. But the very first time through, on that July afternoon, they knew that Robbins had nailed the curtain raiser. The company now had an inkling that whatever trials were to come over the next eight weeks in Detroit and Washington, they could very well be worth it. The troupe would have to dig deep sometimes to remember that.

Alisa Solomon "Wonder of Wonders" (2013)

A time to be born and a time to die
(Ecclesiastes)
2124

The other day I saw a woman's magazine article which posed an interesting question. At what time of life do human relationships become most difficult.

I thought well, I can tell 'em what's the most difficult time for human relationships as far as the average middle class male is concerned.

It's that twenty minutes or so before your guests arrive when you're giving a dinner party.

Now I don't think any of you ladies listening have ever considered what that period is like for the host, for the man about the house

In the first place everything is suddenly out of bounds. You get these warnings shouted at you from upstairs.

"Don't sit on the chairs. I've plumped all the cushions."

"Don't stand by the window, they'll think you're anxious."

There's a pause and then, "Where are you?"

"I'm in the living room."

"ON THE CARPET."

"No. Not on the carpet. I am hanging by a crooked finger from the light fixture."

These long-range up-and-down conversations, by the way, they're another feature of this difficult twenty minutes.

The reason for the to-and-fro shouting is that madam insists on remaining upstairs until the very last moment. The thinking behind it apparently is that if you only puts her dress on when the doorbell rings she avoids any possibility of premature creasing.

You live with that.

But YOU, however, sir, you lurk downstairs in this peculiar state of suspended animation. You mustn't sit down. And there's nowhere you can stand up. Your whole domestic environment has become a sort of mine field.

You know I got once from upstairs? "Did I hear ash dropping onto the rug?"

"NO. NO. Of course not."

"You're not dirtying a clean ashtray I hope."

"No. Not me."

"What are you doing with your ash?"

"I'm SWALLOWING it."

So perhaps now you can understand why I classify that twenty minutes before the guests arrive as the most difficult time in all relationships.

In fact, I now divide dinner parties into two distinct time periods. There's the actual eating period and there's that period before it when all a man CAN do is just grin and bear it.

In other words: a time to be bored and a time to dine

Dennis Norden 545b

Home Robbery


Anyone who has bought a house remembers the rush of emotions when the moment finally arrives to close the deal. There is the excitement of owning your own home, the satisfaction of success, plus a touch of anxiety about whether you can really afford it - and whether you paid too much. All that is kept in check by the rapid presentation of documents to sign and initial.

Once the deed is done, the buyer receives an envelope with copies of all the documents and a list of the closing costs: fees for preparing documents and for filing them, payments to the appraiser and the termite inspector and perhaps one for a tax stamp. Among the bewildering array of little nips at your wallet of $15 here and $150 there, one item stands out as a very big bite - title insurance.

On average, the title insurance premium adds half of 1 percent to the purchase price of a home (except in Iowa, where it costs a lot less). As the price of real estate has ballooned along the coasts, the title insurance industry has jacked up prices, making that bite deeper. Americans paid $16.4 billion for title insurance in 2005, double what they paid five years earlier and four times what they paid in 1995.

Yet title insurance remains an expensive mystery. Why must you buy it? Who exactly is being insured? For what? Why does it cost so much? And why do you have to pay again when you refinance even with the same lender?

Answering those questions takes us inside a business that owes its riches entirely to the government. The product itself costs next to nothing but, because of the way the market is organized, competition pushes prices higher instead of lower and government regulations help hide the true cost. Here it is not Adam Smith's invisible hand of the market producing unexpected benefits through competition, but instead the manipulative hand of government helping the regulated insurers fleece the consumer.

A title proves ownership and it can come in different forms for different possessions. Many communities require that bicycles be licensed, a minimal form of proof that eases recovery if the bike is stolen. Every state has a reliable system to title cars and register outstanding liens that helps hold down the cost of car loans. Yet even though some cars cost more than houses, there is no requirement for title insurance on new cars. Until recently no such requirement existed for used vehicles, either, but the title insurance industry is working to create demand for such coverage.

Establishing rights to land is more complicated than it is for objects like bicycles or automobiles. For starters, there is the issue of where your property ends and your neighbor's begins.

In the United States property line boundaries often trace back to markers that are far from fixed: a bend in the river that may have moved over time with the watercourse, or a landmark rock so large that selecting slightly different reference points on its face results in different boundary lines radiating away from it. Some property records even refer to famous but transitory markers, like a once-renowned oak that was chopped down a century ago.

Even when surveyors mark plot lines from markers set out by the United States Geological Survey, imperfections arise because the Earth is curved while a surveyor's transit measures in straight lines. Mistakes are made, too. Then there is the random outbuilding that encroaches an inch or so onto a neighbor's property, or so he says. Or the easement for an underground pipe that runs right under your garage and needs replacement. And what of the rights to the oil, water, or minerals underground? Or the inheritor who shows up with a copy of his grandfather's will that says he was entitled to a share of the property, only no one told him when the ancestor died two decades ago because he was only seven years old? The land title insurance companies point to examples like these to make the case that the system cannot operate without them.

The land title companies are correct that a reliable system for tracking land ownership is crucial to building wealth, encouraging investment in property, and avoiding violent disputes. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, traces much of the lack of investment in America to uncertainty about land ownership and the failure of governments to enforce property rights. Through careful analysis of land title records in Egypt, Haiti, Peru, and the Philippines, de Soto showed that about 85 percent of urban dwellings are on land being used informally and thus subject to dispute about title.

He calls these buildings "dead capital" and estimated their value, worldwide, at more than $9 trillion. He is among those who favor systems to register land titles, saying this makes the property more valuable. When informally used land is registered with a named owner in Peru, its value doubles instantly. Within a decade such land grows tenfold in value as owners invest in buildings and equipment, creating value.

Much of the civilized world gets along just fine without title insurance. Australia, Europe, and Puerto Rico do not have it. Neither did Canada until the 1990s, when American title insurers started promoting their product to fill a need few imagined existed. In these places there are fewer title disputes per capita than in any of the 49 states that have commercial title insurance (Iowa being the exception). America could eliminate title insurance with simple reforms that would save billions of dollars in reduced litigation. Or we could keep the system, but place the burden of cost where it would be lowest, still saving billions of dollars each year.

De Soto's work shows the value in having a reliable way to tell who owns a piece of land and who has a lien on it. De Soto acknowledges that land title records maintained by government are not perfect. American land title insurance companies exploit this flaw in record keeping to sell a product that costs next to nothing at very high prices.

Based on all the names of land title companies operating in America, there appears to be a vibrant market with hundreds of firms competing for your business, which should mean efficient pricing. But when you follow the trail of ownership it turns out that five huge companies collect 92 percent of all the title insurance premiums paid in America: Fidelity National Financial of Jacksonville, Florida; First American Corporation of Houston; LandAmerica Financial Group of Glen Allen, Virginia; Stewart Information Services of Houston; and Old Republic International Corporation of Chicago. By operating through dozens of subsidiaries these five companies create the appearance of a vibrant and competitive market when in fact the five companies are so dominant that they collected $15.1 billion of the $16.4 billion in title insurance premiums paid in 2005.

The five major companies that are making billions off of this wildly overvalued insurance have too much at stake to allow reform. When a state insurance regulator tried to expose a costly practice, she became the target of a smear campaign orchestrated by one of the country's biggest tide insurance companies.

Economists call the way these five companies control the market an oligopoly. It differs from a monopoly in that a scintilla of price competition may exist, though not always. With just a handful of players it is easy for companies to tacitly keep prices artificially high without colluding outright, which would be illegal.

The big five do compete, but not to sell at the lowest price and without the normal discipline the market provides to squeeze out inefficiency and lower prices. Title insurance is sold in a bizarre kind of market that economists call reverse competition.

Just like it sounds, reverse competition means a market that drives prices up, not down. In title insurance, this happens because the real customers are not the buyers of homes and other real property, although they pay the premiums. The real customers, from the perspective of the title insurance companies, are the people who steer business to them. That is exactly what the title insurance companies tell their shareholders and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stewart Information Services of Houston, which collected $1.9 billion in title insurance premiums in 2005, reported that its "primary sources of title business are attorneys, builders, developers, lenders, and real estate brokers." It made no mention of the people who pay the premiums.

These lawyers, developers, bankers, and real estate salespeople want the highest payments they can get for referring their clients to a particular title insurance company, money politely called "referral fees." The more accurate description is kickbacks and bribes. Kickbacks and commercial bribes are illegal, so the title insurance industry has developed a complex and costly set of ruses to obscure them.

Erin Toll, the Colorado real estate commissioner, spotted the misconduct in 2004. She noticed that a new type of land title insurance in the state, sold only to buyers of new homes, had not resulted in a single claim in eight years. If no claims are made, is there any risk to insure against? It's not surprising that buyers of new homes made no claims. As with new cars, there was little reason to think that a builder would erect houses on land without clear title to it.

Toll found that the builders forced new-home buyers to purchase insurance at inflated prices from title insurance companies that the buildowned, something they called a captive company. The title insurance companies were mere shells, which bought the insurance through land title companies for a tiny fraction of what the home buyers paid, an illegal form of price gouging.

One of the big five land title companies, LandAmerica, tried to stop Toll's investigation. Company e-mails show Ted Chandler, the LandAmerica chief executive, authorizing his executives to use political influence to stop the investigation and to smear Toll.

LandAmerica went to higher-ups in Colorado state government hoping to shut Toll down. The company argued that Toll had a conflict of interest because her former husband, a lawyer, worked for the insurance industry, although in a segment unrelated to title insurance. The higher-ups backed Toll and told LandAmerica its complaints were baseless. LandAmerica was not deterred.

Peter Habenicht, LandAmerica's chief publicity agent, wrote in March 2006 that he would "dig for facts regarding Ms. Toll's stepfather, mother and sisters."

The company asserted that Toll had a conflict because her sisters were partners in a joint venture with LandAmerica in another state. That fact seemed to undercut their case. Assuming that Toll knew what her sisters were doing 2,000 miles away, her investigation demonstrated that she put her public duty ahead of her sisters' interests.

What disturbed LandAmerica the most, internal e-mails obtained by Congress show, was that Toll's investigation had sparked interest by regulators in 19 other states. In one e-mail Peter Kolbe, LandAmerica's senior vice president in charge of lobbying, discussed his efforts to get the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to "kill Erin Toll's captive insurance investigation."

Habenicht also crafted a damning letter that he planned to send to her superiors through his company's outside counsel that was intended to thrust a political knife in Toll's back without anyone noticing who had wielded the blade. In an e-mail, Habenicht described how the draft letter suggested impropriety by Toll but "does not get specific about her alleged conflicts of interests ... rather it merely identifies them broadly. That changes the media game a bit .... Now one of the logical questions becomes 'What conflicts are you referring to, LandAm? Explain what you mean.' And then it gets gritty."

As part of its smear campaign, Kolbe called insurance regulators in other states. One of them, Paul Hansen of Minnesota, recorded the conversation. Kolbe began by saying that Toll "has extremely serious ethical conflicts with the entire insurance industry." He gave no specifics, but threatened, "If she doesn't back off we're going public." And if that happened, Kolbe said, "This is going to get real stinky real quick."

Hansen made it clear he did not believe Toll had done anything wrong. He also suggested that most state insurance regulators would see an attack on Toll as an attack on them. His own superiors, he noted, came to their appointed offices with extensive connections to those they regulated and to people in related fields like building and banking.

Kolbe backpedaled. "We've tried to raise it in a discreet way," Kolbe said. "If we were trying to hurt anybody, which we absolutely are not, we would have picked up the phone to the newspapers."

In addition to Toll's discovery that no claims were made or paid, what prompted her inquiry was the fact that very little of the title insurance premium paid by home buyers went to a real insurance company.

About 80 percent of the premium is kicked back to the person steering the business to the title insurance companies. In California in the years 2003 to 2005 the five big title companies kept only 8 percent to 12 percent of the premium for themselves.

These numbers show reverse competition at work. The competition is for referrals, not the best insurance at the lowest price. The mortgage broker, the banker, the real estate attorney, and the real estate agent bid up the price for steering business to one insurer instead of to another. The New Jersey Supreme Court recognized this when it held that the lawyer whom you think represents your interests in buying is really the agent of whatever title company issues the policy.

Even though kickbacks are illegal, they are thoroughly ingrained in the title insurance industry. Mike Kreidler, the insurance commissioner in Washington State, ordered an investigation based on what Toll found in Colorado. His office found a pervasive system of payments, some disguised and some quite open, and all illegal. His report found a "a clear pattern of inducements and incentives. Although details and form varied from company to company, it became apparent that the inducements and incentives represented similar patterns of behavior for all the companies.

Title companies paid for lavish open houses with catered food and drinks where real estate agents previewed properties understanding that whoever handled the sale would get their client to buy insurance from the host company. Kreidler found golf outings, ski trips, and $900 dinners. Some title insurance companies paid excessive sums for advertising in publications owned by real estate brokers. First American paid $23,000 in one such surreptitious kickback arrangement. Overall, First American spent $120,000 per month on shopping sprees, football game tickets, and other payments to buy business. A state report concluded, "First American offers a prime example of how illegal inducements can help a company attain superior market share."

Washington State found that LandAmerica "made extensive use of co-advertising, gift cards, providing food and drinks at broker opens and meetings, paying for meals and giving away sporting event tickets." Over the course of a year and a half, the company spent more than $25,000 to take real estate agents, bankers, and lawyers on chartered bay cruises paid for by unwitting home buyers.

There was also, and as of this writing still is, quite literally, a free lunch. The title insurance companies take turns picking up the tab for the monthly luncheons of Seattle's board of Realtors.

Everyone in the industry knows these payments are illegal, which is why they create shams to hide them. In Washington State the law allows gifts of no more than $25 per person per year. "There is nothing confusing about the limit," Commissioner Kreidler wrote. The insurance commissioner's office adopted a rule in 1988 to curb these illegal inducements and amended it in 1990. But the investigation showed that the industry was cleverly "skirting the law by creating new schemes and methods for providing inducements in order to obtain title insurance business."

The insurance regulators whose duty is to protect the public have instead mostly turned a blind eye to these payoffs. Even in Washington State, the solution was not to enforce the law, but instead to try a softer approach.

Commissioner Kreidler, who described himself as a champion of consumer rights, wrote that despite the "astonishing number of violations" what was needed to shake up the industry was a new set of recommendations and an education program. He said he felt it would be too expensive to punish the real estate brokers and the insurance companies for past crimes and helpfully suggested that the insurance commission should share some of the responsibility. That is to say, this consumer champion decided to do next to nothing, only to threaten that if deliberate and concealed illegal conduct continued, the law would be enforced some day.

Kreidler had good reason to fear that any serious enforcement of the law would begin a nasty fight. The title insurance industry says it employs more than 100,000 people. It is part of the whole real estate/insurance/lending complex that has long worked closely in the state capitals to shape government rules to serve its interests. A regulatory crackdown could easily spawn legislation cutting the budget for insurance regulators or, worse, passage of a subtle loophole that would make any future enforcement of the laws against kickbacks impossible.

Clearly the system of kickbacks and cover-ups is entrenched and self-sustaining unless the government steps in to control it. Douglas Miller, the chief executive of Title One, a title insurer in Minneapolis, refuses to pay people for steering business to him. "I've had many real estate professionals who were involved in these schemes tell me that they miss my company because our service was better and our fees were lower, but that they are now locked into the partnership and feel that they had no choice but to continue to refer 'their' business to these shams," Miller said.

Prices for land title insurance have not dropped in California, Colorado, Washington, or anywhere else, and the indications are that these practices continue. In paying all this money for title insurance, home buyers assume they are getting something of value. As so little of what they pay is in fact spent on insurance, that raises the question of just how much of the premium for land title insurance is actually needed to provide the protection the policy offers.

Title insurers say that the amount they pay in losses does not fully describe their costs. Unlike fire, automobile, and life insurance companies that pay a claim only after the event, title insurance covers unknown events in the past and so they spend some money on avoiding claims. They duplicate the official property ownership records at government buildings and organize them not by name but by plot, each company carefully guarding its duplicates of these public records. They collect new liens and easements as they are flied and add them to their archives, which they call plants.

So how much does this prophylactic cost? The American Land Title Association puts the figure at "millions of dollars each year." Measured against the billions of dollars collected in premiums, the cost would have to exceed $160 million annually to approach a penny on the premium dollar paid. Birny Birnbaum, an insurance economist who studied the kickbacks for the California insurance commissioner, said the costs are but a tiny fraction of 1 percent of premiums paid. Forbes says that with virtually all plots of land and buildings in America already in corporate databases, the cost of a title search is as little as $25 or less than two cents out of each dollar on the typical premium paid by home buyers.

If your boundary lines turn out to be different from what it says on your deed, or your new swimming pool actually intrudes into the neighbor's land, don't expect the title insurance company to defend you. The company may tell you to handle the litigation yourself. If you prevail, you can seek recompense from the title insurer, which no doubt will assert that your legal bills are excessive and therefore they will pay only what they consider to be reasonable costs. Or maybe you will have to sue the title insurance company, too.

The American Land Title Association acknowledges that little is paid out in claims. It tells consumers that "occasionally, when a title problem can't be cleared, the title insurance company pays a claim. The industry pays hundreds of millions of dollars in claims each year."

In 2005 the industry paid $748 million in claims. That is less than a nickel for each dollar paid in premiums that year. Add in the cost of total searches and that leaves about 94 cents for operating expenses and profits. The industry earned more in interest, dividends, and capital gains from its investments than it paid out in claims in 2005. For every dollar paid to the insured for their losses, the industry made $1.16 in investment gains,

The kickbacks are not hurting the title insurers, either. Stocks of large companies, over long periods of time, have historically earned investors an average total return of a bit more than 10 percent. Shares of First American, which has a quarter of the national market for title insurance, have earned a return of more than 11 percent annually since 1980, even though the company kicked back all but a dime or two of each premium dollar it collected.

What this means is that if you just loaned the title insurance company the amount of your premium interest free for three years and then got your money back, the investment earnings alone would easily cover the insurance company's overhead and the payment of any claims. If the company earns 5 percent on your premium, the first-year interest alone would be greater than the cost of paying claims. Give the company the use of your premium for two more years and you have covered all of the costs, except for those illegal, but never prosecuted, bribes.

The federal government helps the title insurance companies gouge customers by requiring disclosure of only the name of the title insurer and the amount paid on the mortgage application. By just adding a box that discloses in large type the portion of your premium that will be used to pay claims, based on the average payout of, say, the previous three years, customers would know when they are being charged a dollar for a product whose benefit is about four and a half cents. This kind of disclosure would be a cost-effective way to eliminate 85 percent to 90 percent of the cost of title insurance and it would at the same time reduce illegal behavior. Of course, it would come under attack as more costly government regulation, too. In reality, though, the cost would be infinitesimally small compared to the savings for buyers.

Another more elegant approach to stop this gouging is to place the burden of title insurance where it really matters - on the lender. Both the title insurance and mortgage industries acknowledge in their public statements that the lender requires that the title to the property be insured to protect its interests. The home buyer, however, bears the cost.

Adjusting the payment mechanism by making lenders buy title insurance would surely result in less money being spent on title insurance premiums. Banks, savings and loans, and credit unions are sophisticated about these issues, unlike the home buyer. They could negotiate with title insurers for better prices and they could buy in bulk. They could even decide to incorporate the costs of the occasional title problem that cannot be cleared into their cost structure, perhaps charging buyers directly for the portion of the title insurance that covers the buyer's equity in a home.

If banks insured themselves it would create a powerful incentive to be efficient and reduce liability and its associated costs. Then such insurance, which now costs on average about 51 cents per $100 of the purchase price, could well fall to a cost of just a tenth of a penny per $100.

Another way is to adopt the system used in Australia and Europe.

Under these systems, the government checks its records to see if there are any liens or claims and notifies the seller and buyer when the title is clear. Fees are used to pay for checking the files and to fund insurance in the event a mistake is made.

Critics of government per se will no doubt think that this just adds to taxpayer expense. But the cost of such a system, which could be financed with fees paid by those selling their land, would surely be a tiny fraction of what consumers now pay, and thus it would be a net gain to the economy. Indeed, just eliminating the taxpayer costs ofland title litigation for judges, court clerks, and recordkeeping might cancel out the cost of maintaining a proper land registry.

In Iowa there is no private title insurance. Instead, the state government runs the program. The cost is $500 on purchases of homes valued up to $500,000 and $90 for refinancing. Even those charges seem high. As the state improves the quality of its records, the number of claims should dwindle, allowing lower fees in the future.

Legislatures also can enact time limits on title claims. The law lets virtually all criminals, except murderers, escape prosecution if enough time passes before they are caught. In most states minor crimes must be prosecuted within 5 years and most felonies within 10. The same could be done with title claims, allowing some wiggle room, just as the criminal statutes do. For example, the law could start the clock on that seven-year-old boy only when he turns 18 or 21 and reaches his majority. Placing such time limits on claims would decimate payments from land title insurance while at the same time reducing litigation. No system will be perfect, but the goal of government policy should be to gain the most benefit at the lowest cost, not to enrich price gougers.

Until consumers demand reform from their lawmakers, expect to pay 10 times as much for land title insurance as it would cost if our governments enforced the laws on the books to protect consumers and end the costly excesses of reverse competition. And expect to pay about a thousand times the cost of a system in which lenders took out the insurance.

David Cay Johnston "Free Lunch" (2007)

The case of Weldon Angelos raised similar proportionality objections from his sentencing judge. Angelos was required by law to receive a sentence of at least 55 years (660 months) for carrying a gun to two $350 marijuana deals and for having an additional gun in his house. His sentencing judge noted this was more than double the required sentence for a kingpin of a major drug trafficking ring in which death resulted (293 months), an aircraft hijacker (293 months), a terrorist who detonates a bomb in a public place intending to kill a bystander (235 months), a racist who attacks a minority with the intent to kill (210 months), a spy gathering top-secret information (210 months), a second-degree murderer (151 months), a kidnapper (151 months), a saboteur who destroys military materials (151 months), a marijuana dealer who shoots an innocent person during a drug transaction (146 months), the rapist of a 0o-year-old child (135 months), and a child pornographer who photographs a 12-year-old in sexual positions (108 months)."

It is not just drug sentencing that exhibits this kind of disproportionality, It makes little retributive sense for a woman who forged a $200 check to receive a 20-year sentence. It is similarly inconsistent with retributive notions for a man who lent his car to friends who committed a burglary that resulted in a death to receive a life sentence when intentional killings typically receive less. In Louisiana alone, more than 300 people are serving sentences of life without parole despite never having been convicted of a violent crime.

Or consider the irrationality of treating child pornography more seriously than the actual molestation of a child. Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan has pointed out the absurdity of a system where "a defendant with no prior criminal record and no history of abusing children would qualify for a sentence of 15 to 20 years based on a small collection of child pornography and one photo swap, while a 50-year-old man who encountered a 13-year-old girl online and lured her into a sexual relationship would get no more than four years." In Arizona, Morton Berger, a man with no prior criminal record, ended up with a 200-year sentence for child pornography. One of the justices on the Arizona Supreme Court observed the irrationality of the state sentencing scheme, where "the minimum sentence for possession of an image of child pornography is longer than the presumptive sentence for rape or aggravated assault. A presumptive sentence for possession of two images of child pornography ... is harsher than the sentences for second degree murder or sexual assault of a child under twelve.

With results such as these, it is not surprising that a report commissioned by the Department of Justice found that lengthy prison sentences are not the best way to deter crime. A 2016 report by the president's Council of Economic Advisers concurred, concluding that "research on the impact of sentence length has found that longer sentences are unlikely to deter prospective offenders or reduce targeted crime rates." What makes a larger difference on behavior is improving the odds that someone will serve a sentence. That is, certainty of punishment matters more than severity for deterrence.

Consistent with these findings, we have seen state after state reduce sentence lengths without an increase in crime rates or recidivism. Seven states put fewer people in prison while also experiencing decreases in their crime rates: California, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, South Carolina, Texas, and New York. California is a particularly striking example; from 2006 to 2012, it cut its prison population by 23%, and violent crime fell by 21%. Texas also saw its violent crime, property crime, and recidivism rates fall while shrinking its prison population. Indeed, states that lowered their incarceration rates have seen a greater drop in their crime rates than the states where imprisonment rates have increased. West Virginia, for example, increased its incarceration rate more than any other state but experienced a 6% increase in crime.

The federal system likewise shows that sentences can be lowered without affecting crime rates and recidivism. In 2007, the U.S. Sentencing Commission reduced the sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine offenses by two levels (roughly 20%) and applied the change not only to future cases, but retroactively so that those in prison for crack offenses could petition to receive the reduction. The commission then studied the recidivism rates of those offenders who received the reduction with a comparable group of crack offenders who were released before the effective date of the amendment, so ended up serving their full sentences. The commission found that, even years after their release, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups when it came to recidivism rates. The group receiving the shorter sentences had a 43.3% recidivism rate, and those who served the longer sentences had a 47.8% recidivism rate.

In fact, longer sentences can actually threaten public safety. The Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections found that, "absent effective rehabilitative programs, the experience of incarceration can be criminogenic, or likely to cause the very behavior it is punishing." Programming is often nonexistent in prison, so the criminogenic effects of prison are typically not counteracted by affirmative benefits. The longer sentences people serve, the harder it is for them to reenter successfully into society. People who have served long periods of time in prison have a difficult time adjusting to an environment that is not highly controlled because their social skills and ability to make independent decisions atrophy when they are incarcerated. One study using data from Texas found that each additional year of a prison sentence caused a 4 to 7% increase in an individual's recidivism rate once he or she was released. Another study of juveniles in Chicago found that detaining them increased their likelihood of recidivism after release by 22 to 26%.

Longer sentences also put a strain on limited prison resources, thus making it less likely that there are enough rehabilitative resources to go around to all those who need them in prison. For instance, a recent study of federal prisons found that the demand exceeded the capacity for many programs found to lower recidivism and assist with reentry. These programs include GED programs, postsecondary education, vocational training, and treatment programs for sex offenders. The overcrowding caused by longer sentences has deleterious effects even apart from the strain it places on rehabilitative resources; overcrowding itself causes behavioral problems in people in prison.

We also know that long sentences bring diminishing returns because most people will age out of crime in any case. For most crimes, the likelihood that someone will continue committing them once they hit 40 is negligible. Most juveniles discontinue their criminal activity after brief experimentation with it. People who commit property crimes tend to stop in their 20s, and people who commit violent crimes typically cease those activities in their early 30s. Drug trafficking also tends to taper off sometime in an an individual's thirties. More than half of all people arrested are under 30 for the majority of the crimes the FBI tracks. and research shows that for the eight most serious crimes tracked by the FBI, adults tend to commit them over a 5- to 10-year period and then stop.

There are exceptions. Financial fraud is most likely among those 41 to 50 years old, and more than half of cases involve an individual who is more than 40 years o1d. That is because "older professionals occupy positions with authority and more access to company resources. While most sex offenders reoffend less frequently as they get older, with the peak years for rape offenders occurring between 25 and 29 and declining thereafter, one exception is extra-familial child molesters, who do not see a decline in offending rates until age 50. Indeed, child molesters actually see their rates of offending increase between ages 20 and 40. Individuals also do not apppear to age out of gambling along the traditional lines.

But for most other crimes, especially violent ones, individuals cease the activity in their 30s, if not before. Thus long sentences for most offenses may not be doing anything after the offender reaches a certain age, other than costing the state money that could be better used for other law enforcement purposes.

Given these facts, it is unsurprising that studies analyzing the relationship between crime rates and prison expenditures show that increasing sentences does not always bring a reduction in crime. While the increase in incarceration from the early 1970s to early 1990s may be responsible for between 6% and 25% of the crime reduction in that period, the continued growth in prison expenditures in the 1990s had no statistically significant relationship with a reduction in violent crime. An analysis of the prison population growth studies from before and after the mid-1990s concluded that the reason for the difference is that the increase in prison growth in the latter period was largely driven by an increase in the incarceration rate of people committing drug offenses and low-level crimes. For this group in particular, the crime-increasing effects of incarceration might outweigh any deterrent or incapacitation effect of imprisonment.

While there is no denying that incapacitating someone prevents them from committing crimes outside the prison, if the person was going to stop committing crimes in any event because they were going to age out of crime (as the studies show), there is no point in incapacitating them beyond the point at which they would otherwise age out of their criminal behavior. To do so is to spend money without a corresponding benefit. Moreover, any incapacitation benefit lasts only as long as the person stays incarcerated. And although politicians often speak as if people get sent away for the rest of their lives, the reality is that more than 95% of the people sent to prison are released. Since 1990, an average of almost 600,000 prisoners have been released to the community each year. So any incapacitation benefit that we get while someone is incarcerated has to be weighed against the likelihood that the person might be a greater danger to society when he or she comes back out because the longer that person spends in prison, the more likely it is that his or her reentry will be a bumpy one. A comprehensive summary of the research concluded that "incarceration certainly reduces crime outside prison as long as it lasts, but appears to cause more crime later."

These downsides explain why there is now a growing body of research showing that increases in incarceration reach a tipping point whereby incarceration is not associated with reductions in crime but is instead correlated with increases in crime rates. For example, longer sentences were associated with a 4% increase in recidivism for low-risk offenders, and a 3% increase overall. Daniel Nagin, a professor of public policy and statistics at Carnegie Mellon and an elected fellow of the American Society of Criminology, notes: "Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Inmates learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment." As one commentator put it, "After a certain point, as prison populations continue to grow, the benefit of incarceration declines and reverses, and you even see crime increase. That seems to me to be where we are now."

Rachel Barkow " Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration" (2019)

He was frustrated by the amateur code which mandated that college athletes should play for no pay. Coach Bill Sprackling, who held a full-time job at the Collier Wire Company in Providence, later recalled that numerous stories circulated that Pollard would attempt to solicit funds from downtown businessmen who were enthusiastic about Brown football. Just before a Saturday game, the stories went, Pollard would explain that he was financially strapped, and that if he did not get his bills paid he would not be able to play in the upcoming game. The former Brown assistant coach maintained that Pollard "was quite successful in this." Although there is no solid evidence to support Sprackling's account, it is consistent with Pollard's business dealings in later years. His son recalled him as an "operator," who always had several financial deals going to support himself and his family,"

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Brown opened its 1916 football season on September 30 with a game against Rhode Island State at Andrews Field. The Rhode Island Rams were clearly overmatched, but made a stronger showing than in previous years. Brown rolled up three touchdowns by the early part of the third period and went on to an 18-0 victory. That Brown missed three extra points in the game was not unusual for a team of that era. In 1916, points after touchdown either had to be kicked from placement or drop-kicked from a position perpendicular to the point where the ball crossed the goal line for the touchdown. In many cases, the kicker was forced to attempt the conversion from an acute angle. The alternative for the scoring team was to punt the ball out of its end zone to the kicker, who then attempted a kick in the face of the on-charging defensive team. Thus, the success of a conversion after touchdown most often depended on where the ball crossed the goal line on the scoring play."

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Pollard had an outstanding game against Rhode Island, but like most of the regulars sat out the fourth quarter. The Brown Daily Herald designated Pollard and halfback Jimmy Jemail, who scored two touchdowns, the stars of the game. The highlight of the game for Brown was the outstanding play of about a half-dozen freshmen who played most of the second half. The play of fullback Walter de Vitalis, who scored one touchdown, and Dune Annan, a future professional player who replaced Purdy at quarterback in the fourth period, indicated that Brown had more depth than in 1915.

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On the Brown campus, Pollard was also a celebrity, but he was careful to share credit for his good fortune with his teammates and the university. As Pollard later explained, "I felt very highly honored and only wanted to keep my feet on the ground because I felt that our whole team had played a very important part in my having received this great honor and I did not want to do anything which might reflect on Brown University or any of the players." While Pollard was genuinely grateful to his teammates and school, he also knew that the racial code of the day demanded that he, a young black man, be properly modest and humble in accepting this honor. Yet, he would have a difficult time keeping his feet on the ground. His brash, assertive personality took over. He later admitted that "I was young and foolish and crazy. I was Fritz Pollard, All-America, and my head was getting a little bit big then,"

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One day in mid-January 1917, President Faunce summoned Pollard to his office and introduced him to a dignified looking gentleman whom Faunce identified as John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Faunce asked whether Fritz knew who Mr. Rockefeller was, and Pollard replied that he did not. Rockefeller, an 1897 Brown graduate and former manager of the school's football team, asked Pollard a number of questions, and then he was excused. The next day Faunce visited Pollard's Hope College room and explained that Rockefeller thought Fritz's room was too cramped, with all the pressing equipment and the clothes hanging everywhere. Rockefeller, the president explained, had made arrangements for Pollard to have another separate room for his living quarters and new pressing equipment, all at Rockefeller's expense. Evidence suggests that Rockefeller later had the files destroyed which related to his subsidy of Pollard; at the time, Pollard recalled Faunce telling him that "from now on you won't have any financial worries,"

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Apparently Faunce saw no inconsistency with the arrangement despite his earlier statement at the Harvard football rally that "if a man wants to get paid for playing football Brown University is no place for him." Rockefeller's visit to campus came within a week of a National Collegiate Athletic Association meeting at which the University of Chicago football coach and athletic director A. Alonzo Stagg introduced a resolution calling for a survey of intercollegiate athletics "with particular reference to their moral influence." Stagg maintained that "a college was responsible for the actions of its athletes, and that when they practice the dishonesty that is known to be the case in many instances, the fault is that of the college." Certainly Pollard had no qualms about Rockefeller's generosity; he purchased the latest pressing equipment in downtown Providence, selected a second, more spacious room in Hope College for his living quarters, and forwarded the bills to Faunce's office."

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During the spring semester, Pollard engaged in a large number of campus and off-campus activities which consumed a good deal of his time. In the winter, for example, he cultivated his lifelong interest in music by playing the slide trombone in both the Brown Band and Orchestra. Late in March, Pollard performed in a musical number in a popular student-produced theatrical farce along with Ink Williams, who did a clog dance with quarterback Jimmy Murphy. The inclusion of the two African-American students indicated that they were being accorded a greater degree of acceptance by the white student body. Pollard was also a member of the varsity indoor and outdoor track teams, and quickly established himself as one of the premier hurdlers and sprinters in New England. Beyond this, he played in the student-organized interclass basketball league. Brown did not field an intercollegiate basketball team in the prewar era

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John Carroll "Fritz Pollard" (1992)