Links: Juvenile Justice and the Printed Page
Posted: March 13, 2009 Filed under: CLTL, current events | Tags: CLTL, criminal justice, juvenile, kindle, literature, reading 1 Comment »Looking for Wednesday’s essay? Click here to jump to Anna Wulick’s account of her love affair with literature, “Bonding with Books.”
Is Incarceration Always the Answer?
Over at Carolannunemployed, the author discusses the options communities have in treating juvenile offenders:
Juvenile detention should not be a communities only correctional alternative. Correctional options should exist that serve to guide children, and help them learn to make better choices by providing them with counseling, and a better future by provide the juvenile with education, correction, and job search assistance. The focus of juvenile justice should be to provide children who commit crimes with a future as a productive member of society.
Resisting the Kindle
Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age tells The Atlantic what we lose when moving from print to electronic texts. The folks over at Conversational Reading weigh in on the debate.
Why, then, am I so uneasy about the page-to-screen transfer—a skeptic if not a downright resister? Perhaps it is because I see in the turning of literal pages—pages bound in literal books—a compelling larger value, and perceive in the move away from the book a move away from a certain kind of cultural understanding, one that I’m not confident that we are replacing, never mind improving upon. I’m not blind to the unwieldiness of the book, or to the cumbersome systems we must maintain to accommodate it—the vast libraries and complicated filing systems. But these structures evolved over centuries in ways that map our collective endeavor to understand and express our world. The book is part of a system. And that system stands for the labor and taxonomy of human understanding, and to touch a book is to touch that system, however lightly.
Also check out :
The Kenyon Review‘s Kirsten Ogden: “The Rise of Reading (or, the art of finding a quiet nook)”
The New York Times’ Kareem Fahim: “Seeking to Intervene With Young Adults Before Crime Becomes a Way of Life.”
The Chronicle Review‘s Mark Bauerlein: “On the Value of Cheap Old Paperbacks”
Read anything interesting lately? Share your links with us in the comments section below.
Thanks Jenni for this update on ongoing and important issues about reading, literature and criminal justice. We need a sustained and “deep” national conversation about these crucial issues. I continue to hope that this CLTL blog will contribute to that effort.