Photographer Shares His Love Of The City With His Trinity Students
Hartford Courant  
Ostensibly, professor Pablo Delano teaches photography at Trinity College. But other subjects meander into the mix, like street smarts and community relations. On the second meeting of his introductory seminar for freshmen, he loaded all 12 shutterbugs into a van for a rollicking half-day tour of Hartford.
It was the gastronomical equivalent of a pub-crawl: they sampled falafel at Tangiers International Market; Salvadoran pupusas at Camilla’s Latin Restaurant; and meat patties at Scott’s Jamaican Bakery. They listened to restaurateurs talk about their neighborhoods and their lives. Delano and his charges also walked hither and yon.
Hartford, after all, would be the focus of their photographic odyssey for the next four months, and they needed to get familiar with their subject. Random “pointing and clicking” wasn’t on the menu.
The first thing Delano impressed upon his class was that Hartford — the city he loves and has documented with his camera for 20 years — is worth knowing through personal experience, rather than by reputation only…

Beyond Reach: Even As Magnet School Seats Remain Empty, Racial Quotas Keep Many Black, Latino Students Out
Hartford Courant
As the new school year approached for Hartford magnet schools, seats opened up at popular Capital Prep north of downtown — a boon for some of the hundreds of wait-listed students eager to attend the school that pledges to shepherd every graduating senior into a four-year college. But that good news would never trickle down to the students. The next in line on Capital Preparatory’s waitlist were minority students. And enrolling more black or Latino students, officials concluded, would jeopardize efforts to meet integration standards created under Connecticut’s historic Sheff v. O’Neill desegregation case. … But Trinity Professor Jack Dougherty, who has studied the Sheff remedy for years, said the state’s approach is no surprise, as it avoids the potential legal pitfalls of race-based decisions. “Why did Connecticut love using the town as a proxy? Because it was so far away from race, they were never going to get sued,” he said. “So I think Connecticut held on to this because it was legally defensible — though not a very good idea.”…

The Prosecutors’ Prison State – By Edward P. Stringham
The Wall Street Journal
Imagine if a business did not have to worry about convincing paying customers to choose its product and could stick non-customers with the bill. Bureaucracies like the Postal Service, Amtrak and the Department of Veteran Affairs have that luxury. But imagine further that the enterprise could force its services on users whether they like it or not. Law enforcement is one of the few American entities that enjoys this privilege. The U.S. now has twice as many prosecutors as it did in the 1970s—and each one now sends more than twice as many people to prison as he or she did in that period.
In the extremely important book, “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform,” John F. Pfaff analyzes why America incarcerates more people than ever even as crime rates continue to fall. State and federal prisons jailed 200,000 Americans in the early 1970s; today they hold more than 1.5 million people. Another 700,000 are locked up in local jails. The U.S. now has higher incarceration rates than Russia or Cuba…
Mr. Stringham is the K.W. Davis Endowed Professor of Economic Organizations and Innovation at Trinity College and the author of “Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life.”

Leaping Beyond the Prison Walls
Common Dreams
…What unites Leapers is a shared commitment to learning as a form of social activism. They understand that the specific concerns, denials, and oppressions that frame each learning journey are connected, born of unjust political and economic systems. For example, Leapers reading about the contemporary crisis of mass incarceration have recognized the links between today’s hyper-imprisonment of poor urban youth of color and campaigns of state repression unleashed against the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Other Leapers identified a provocative intersection between food justice and criminal justice when in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death whole Baltimore neighborhoods (essentially food deserts) went hungry because corner stores and fast food chains were damaged or looted.
This awareness was not immediate; rather it evolves, continually, in dialogue with one another and through involvement with activist communities. In January, for example, Leapers welcomed Dr. Johnny Williams, community organizer and Assistant Professor of Sociology at Trinity College, Hartford. The professor’s talk, which considered the insidious effects of capitalism and the potential of socialism as an alternative means of organizing society, offered one conceptual framework for their projects. His visit was a kind of intellectual initiation in that he challenged many cherished and naive notions Leapers held, notably their near-unanimous and uncritical devotion to Barack Obama…

Indian-Americans Are Called ‘Model Minorities.’ But That Label Doesn’t Protect Against Racism
The Huffington Post
…The biggest change came in 1965, with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which eliminated national quotas and resulted in a dramatic increase in Indians arriving in America. Those who were allowed in were not representative of all potential Indian immigrants ― they were a selected group of highly skilled professionals and students.
Vijay Prashad, a professor of International Studies at Trinity College, told The Huffington Post that this wave of Indian immigrants was “twice blessed.” They were born into an independent India. And they arrived in the United States after 1965, missing out on the great marches and demonstrations that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
“This generation misses the two great struggles of India and America and is the beneficiary of both of those struggles, but don’t acknowledge this because they’ve been gifted it,” Prashad said. “The first generation arrives as in a daze, thinking that ‘We are here because we are smart, we did well in school, we are professionals, and our children should follow us.’”
When in fact, Prashad said, “They lived in a bubble.”…