New Orleans        Doing Wade’s World for the last more than a dozen years on KABF, WAMF, KEUD, and the other stations supported by AM/FM, week in and out, 52 times per year, you wear the weight of the calendar.  One thing I learned to appreciate in a bit of surprise is some of the media PR people who were seeking interviews for their clients.  There were several on the progressive side, who specialized in books, Gail Leonard-Wright and then Peter Bermudes, in Massachusetts, and Javier Perez in Miami, as well as some random ones that had a mixture of clients they were promoting.  Over the years, I would know them all better and how they worked, and they would know my interests and sense of our audience better as well.

Recently, Peter surprised me in two ways.  He sent me a book with post-it notes highlighting the sections of a book on youth prisons that featured a story of the notorious youth facility in Tallulah, Louisiana.  How could I say “no”, to talking to Nell Berstein about her book, In Our Future We are Free:  The Dismantling of the Youth Prison?  I couldn’t.

I was sick of talking to people about prisons.  The subject is bleak and progress on the ground has been thin.  This was a rare situation in which the progress has been real, including in Louisiana.  I knew Tallulah well.  On my almost monthly drive back and forth between Little Rock and New Orleans, Tallulah is one of the mileposts, that notes half-way almost between those cities.  I turn north from I-20 going to Little Rock and east from Tallulah onto I-20 towards Vicksburg, Mississippi, going home.  The youth prison there was a horror, one of many.  There was a point in Louisiana where there was uproar in recent years about moving youth to the death row section of Angola, a nationally known horror of incarceration on the site of a former plantation.

Nell had come to this story from decades of activity following and supporting youth programs, first in the Bay Area, and more generally following the carceral efforts seeking to brand young people as super-predators that exploded the population.  There is good news thanks for reformers and legislators, who finally totaled up the costs underpinning their false ideology about young people.  The numbers nationally have dropped from 108,000 in 2000 to 27,600 in 2022, which is still too many, but it has forced a lot of facilities to close, including the one in Tallulah.  New York figured the cost at more than $200,000 per child.  None of this calculates the enduring and permanent damage done to the children and their families forever.

It was good to see some shoutouts for Ernest Johnson and his work from New Orleans, as well as the work of Friends and Families of Incarcerated Children.  Their efforts were joined with others around the country.  More needs to be done, but hats off to everyone for the progress made so far.

The second surprise from Peter, besides nailing my interest in Tallulah, was his news that he is moving on and shutting down his work in this area.  He sees fewer progressive books and authors and likely more to the point, their publishers increasingly leave them to their own devices and social media while deserting more powerful media like radio.  The real issue is likely found in a current report in the Times:  people are reading less in the United States.  Book purchases are down, while audiobooks are up.

Maybe, but the “voice of the people” runs 24/7, and we have a job to do 52 weeks of the year, so we count the progress where we find it.