• The World In 2008 | Wanted: jobs for Africans
  Dark predictions for the future of urban africa, based on the theory that Africa’s poorly positioned to create manufacturing jobs and better positiioned for unemployed young men to participate in criminal gangs
  (tags: africa futurism business economics development)
• The World In 2008 | Cash on call
  Tom Standage celebrates mobile money, using most of the usualy examples
  (tags: mobile telephony mcommerce africa mpesa)
• Texting tool used to harass young Indian women | FP Passport
  An interesting – and ultimately ill-thought out – SMS egovernment tool let people discover the contact information for the owners of a vehicle in India based on license plate. Predictably, it became used to harrass female vehicle owners
  (tags: india egovernment ict4d technology mobile sms)
• What if the United States were Sweden? | FP Passport
  A new study ranks Sweden’s development aid as the most effective. FP looks at the rationale and talks about what might be possible if US citizens were as generous as Swedes in international aid
  (tags: international development aid economics)
• Planning Rwanda
  Is widespread city planning for Kigali unrealistic for a country that can’t provide electricity to more than 5% of its population? Or is it the key to future survival in a country where the population is outpacing the abilility to grow food?
  (tags: africa cities rwanda urban planning design)
• Mobile phones and protest | Cats, mice and handsets | Economist.com
  An overview of use of mobile technologies for protests by Evgeny Morozov
  (tags: mobile activism ict4d humanrights freespeech)

• AlterNet: Access Denied: Mapping Global Censorship
  Analee Newitz describes the GV Access Denied map as “the weirdest (and saddest) map mashup ever” and has the useful critique that we don’t focus on censorship within companies and universities
  (tags: censorship freespeech advocacy globalvoices)

About week ago, I posted a job vacancy on Global Voices’s website – Executive Director. I’ve gotten a couple of emails that make me think I should clarify why what we’re looking for in an executive director and my future working with Global Voices.

Global Voices is one of those rare endeavours that succeeds well beyond the hopes of its founders. When Rebecca and I began talking about the project in 2004, the hope was to discover a few bloggers in the developing world and make sure a wider audience knew about them. It would have been unrealistic to believe that we’d become one of the most widely cited blogs in the world, or that we’d be a primary source of information on important stories that weren’t otherwise covered in English-language media.

Neither Rebecca nor I really wanted to found an NGO. I’d founded one before – Geekcorps – and was chairing the board of another – Worldchanging. So we did our best to keep from making people economically dependent on the organization, hiring only part-time employees and relying heavily on volunteer labor. But the community of people involved with GV as editors, contributors, translators and technologists has grown, and management of that team – as well as fundraising to support that team – is now a full-time job.

Rebecca has a full-time job – she’s teaching at Hong Kong University. I don’t want a full-time job – I’ve been enjoying a worklife that combines some academic work, some work supporting foundations like Open Society Institute, and a lot of writing, on this blog and elsewhere. If anything, I’d like more time, in the hopes of writing something longer than my prolix blog posts.

Global Voices has grown to the level of complexity and importance where it deserves someone who can focus on its present and future every day, something that I’ve never been able to do. At the same time, Global Voices needs some guidance from people who’ve been involved with it from day one. With that in mind, Rebecca and I are both sitting on the board of directors of the nonprofit we’re founding to manage Global Voices – for the first year, at least, I will be chairing that board. I also plan to spend the first half of next year working closely with that new executive director, especially on fundraising issues. But we desperately need someone who can eat, sleep and breathe Global Voices, helping us figure out how to harness the energy of our amazing community and build an organization that can carry out our work for the next ten or twenty years.

The job description I posted is looking for an almost superhuman set of traits – someone with experience managing NGOs and especially in fundraising; someone who understands the worlds of journalism and weblogs; someone who is likely to be respected and embraced by our community. These people do exist – I’ve met some of them. But we would really use your help finding them. If you know of people who might be interested in this position, please point them to our site and encourage them to apply. Thanks for passing this opportunity around and helping us find Mr. or Ms. Right.

• MoveOn to Facebook: We caught you red-handed | The Social – CNET News.com
  Facebook’s original design for Beacon included global opt-out of the service, which is what many privacy advocates (myself included) would like to see as an option. Interesting that Facebook removed this before launch
  (tags: facebook privacy activism)
• BBC NEWS | Africa | Ethiopia ‘bogged down’ in Somalia
  Somalia is Zenawi’s Iraq.
  (tags: ethiopia somalia africa)
• Si a Internet: our answer to traditional media
  Si a internet – an interesting idea from Martin Varsavsky, a campaign to link sites to “a website explaining how Internet is becoming the real source for critical thinking and not a safe haven for terrorists, drug addicts and pedophiles…”
  (tags: internet spain advocacy freespeech)
• News | Africa – Reuters.com
  Wael Abbas’s YouTube channel, which documented Egyptian police abuse, is removed for graphic content. Elijah Zarwan argues that it’s probably not Egyptian pressure on Google, but it’s a reminder of the importance of the Witness hub
  (tags: blogs censorship egypt humanrights torture video youtube)

Global Voices has been swamped with comments this past week, and has seen a surge in traffic. What’s the issue that’s got everyone speaking out? The Israel-Palestine peace talks in Annapolis? Emergency rule in Pakistan? Britney Spears’s plan to invade Uganda?

Nope. Ants.

Ants are big business in China, where they are a popular ingredient in a variety of Chinese medicines. And some Chinese businesses are researching new health products based around ants. The Tianxi Group President, Wang Fengyou explains:

21 century is a century of life sciences, which is the general trend of the development of modern science. Exploring life sciences and letting them serve people is the goal which Yilishen Tianxi Group Is consistently pursuing. Yilishen Tianxi Group has minutely focused on ants. We aim to scientifically and reasonably examine the consumption and medicinal values of ants and to produce high-quality ant products. We provide health care products to every corner of the world and actually realize the logo of our company.

The logo of Yilishen Tianxi Group

Yilishen Tianxi group pursued their production of high-quality ant products by encouraging investors to purchase ant-farming kits from them, producing crops of ants and selling them back to the company. Others simply bought shares in the company, which promised a regular dividend on funds invested. The Yilishen Tianxi Group is rumored to have collected over 10 billion yuan (about $1.4 billion USD), primarily from small investors.

As you might have guessed, Yilishen Tianxi wasn’t able to provide timely dividends to their investors. According to press reports, their “herbal viagra” product contained the active ingredient in Viagra, making it illegal to sell in the US as a health supplement. It’s possible that the company meant to purchase ants from their ant farmers, but it’s also possible that the company was simply a Ponzi scheme. These certainly aren’t new to China – Wang Zhendong, the creator of another ant farming scheme, was sentenced to death for swindling residents of the Liaoning province of almost $400 million.

Many of the investors who lost money to Yilishen lived in or around Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province. As it became clear that thousands had lost their life savings, some took to the streets, some mobbed government offices… and many took to the blogs. John Kennedy, our Chinese-language editor, has an amazing collection of videos, photos and blog posts that detail the company’s collapse, the anger of investors and the reaction of the government to outrage over the ant farming industry. Most of these blogposts were deleted or blocked by Chinese internet censors, and John’s collection of posts became one of the best ways for angry Liaoning residents to follow the controversy… until the Chinese government began blocking our article, possibly due to a keyword block on the term “Yilishen”.

For those of us outside of China, it’s useful to take a close look at situations like the Yilishen protests. First, it’s worth asking the question of why people would invest in an idea like ant farming. Richard Spencer, writing from Beijing, offers useful insight:

With banks offering tiny interest rates for China’s glut of personal savings, and investing abroad not allowed for most people, pensions have gone into property speculation, the highly volatile stock market, and in many cases small companies relying on local appeal.

This sort of behavior isn’t uncommon in countries transitioning to a capitalist system, which suddenly experience entrepreneurship without regulation. Pyramid schemes were extremely common in post-Communist states – widespread pyramid schemes nearly destroyed the Albanian economy in 1996.

It’s also worth asking why this particular issue sparked censorship on the part of the Chinese government. The simple answer – it brought people into the streets, as some of the photos on the Global Voices post document. When online action leads to manifestations in the physical world, it’s a sure thing that online protests will get blocked or censored.

Ultimately, it looks like the provincial government will step in, perhaps to compensate the victims of this failed business. In that sense, the reaction to Yilishen – offline and online protests – looks a bit like the Russian reaction to the scam Gravikol medications, where protesters managed to get the Russian government to act to protect purchasers.

It’s worth noting that this story received very light coverage in European and US media, though it was clearly of major interest to Chinese bloggers. Another case where I feel like Global Voices is doing its job half-well… we’re finding important undercovered stories, but we’re not always doing a great job of getting Western media to pay attention to them.

The name “Michael Anti” is known by almost everyone who follows free speech issues. Journalist 赵京, aka “An Ti”, became internationally famous when Microsoft blocked his Chinese-language politics blog hosted on their Spaces service. Before he became well-known as a blogger, Anti worked as a researcher in the Beijing bureau of the New York Times. He was – very briefly – a Chinese correspondent in Baghdad during the Iraq war, but had to leave when the newspaper he worked for was shut down by the government. He’s now a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and is studying the question of how blogs and mainstream media have interacted in different countries.

Anti recently returned from Germany, where he served on the jury of the Best of the Blogs, which gave him an opportunity to think about the role of blogs in different societies. He offers two reasons why blogs have social impacts:

- Because you’re having an election, which means that public opinion matters, and blogs become a political mobilization tool
- Because NGOs embrace them and use them to lobby for social change.

Neither of these cases applies in China, he tells us, as there are no elections and no functional NGOs.

He mentions that there are lots of projects trying to monitor China by following internet news – Global Voices, China Media Project, new projects at Hong Kong University. In 2004 and 2005, it made sense to follow blogs to find this “sharp news”. But since 2006, most of the interesting and dissenting news is coming from chat rooms. 2004 and 2005, he tells us, were the “golden years” for the Chinese blogosphere… and they’re over now.

The golden age began with Muzi Mei’s sex diary, where she began detailing her encounters with various men in late 2003, to the shock and tittilation of the general public. It ended, he believes, with the blockage of his blog by Microsoft in late 2005. “The government can control every aspect of speech via keyword censorship, firewalls and self-censorship.”

So the Chinese internet has gone “back to the old years”, and chat rooms have returned to importance. Chatrooms have existed in China since 1998, and they’re popular venues for spreading “sharp news”. (Talking with Anti before his talk, he mentioned that he used to post articles to dozens of chat rooms, switching from one to another quickly, turning a one-to-one medium into a broadcast.) Email is also incredibly important as a space for disseminating political information. Since the introduction of email in China – which Anti says became widespread in 1996 – mailing lists became incredibly important, often used as a space to trade “secret information about politics and religion.” These mailing lists, he points out, connect elites, not the mainstream. “We’re making social change using web 1.0, not using web 2.0.”

Web 2.0 is associated with democratization and decentralization in the US and Europe. These tools make it possible for people to have a voice, and for online voices to become powerful in an offline space. “But this can only happen in democratic countries,” he argues. In China, the problem with these tools is that they’re centralized, living on a single server. Block wordpress.com and you block millions of voices; blog twitter.com and you block the entire service. They’re easy to control via firewalls and government centralized control.

But email and chatrooms aren’t as centralized. There are chatrooms on thousands of servers, and it’s hard for the government to block every chatroom overseas. It’s easy to blog webmail, but people who use POP mail are difficult to block and prevent from talking about sensitive topics. Oddly enough, GMail remains unblocked in China – Anti believes it’s because so many government officials and businessmen use it, and it would be difficult to block it without negative implications for powerful people.

“We don’t need new media theory to explain blogs in China: blogs are old media,” Anti argues. “We had no media before 1996 – we had propoganda.” In propoganda, the party speaks to you – it’s exclusively one-way communication. The internet introduces the idea of bi-directoinal media, and creates media as we understand it for the first time in China in 1996.

“Time Magazine says ‘You are the media’. It’s the opposite in China.” Media has become blogs. Sina.com – a massively important website, because it syndicates content from every newspaper in China – recruited bloggers to create content similar to the Huffington Post. “They’re not really blogs – they’re more like a column.” The rise of bloggy content on Sina brought two new things to the Chinese media world: Hollywood-style celebrity reporting and syndication, the capacity to reach a nationwide audience with a single article.

Anti argues that there are only two places in the world where journalists have become famous bloggers – China and Iran. In most nations, bloggers exist to fact-check and oppose the media. But in China, the most famous bloggers are actually journalists.

The reason for this, Anti speculates, is about human resources. As the Chinese press became marketized and large news corporations emerged, there was a massive shortage of talented journalists. The government has responded by opening almost a thousand journalism schools since 2000, but the graduates aren’t very well trained: “You can’t trust them – they’re really stupid.” The media had trust in the Internet instead, and media companies started hiring “famous netizens”, people who were prominent as writers on bulletin boards and chat rooms. “I am a famous netizen. Before that, I was a hotel receptionist.” But Anti was hired to a newspaper based on his online commentaries, written between 1998 and 2001.

Because so many of the people in the media have an internet background, they have “an Internet heart”. On the surface, they are very conservative, but behind the scenes, they welcome bloggers. This isn’t about embracing new media – it’s about a human resources strategy to staff newspapers. But over the course of about five years, “the Internet changed the inside of Chinese media.”

“The guy who censored my blog – we’re friends. Every week, we get together and eat. We’re very close friends. The guy censored and the guy who censors – we are together.” The public face of internet censorship is very professional: “I know you are right, but this is my job. When you get the job, you can do the same to me.” But inside, the censors are very liberal, people who are living in the era of the internet and the market.

Mosaics of logos of Web2.0 companies, posted on flickr. English mosaic is by Stabillo Boss, Chinese mosaic by 阿华

China has copied every aspect of Web2.0. So Chinese users are using Web 2.0 widely… just not the same tools as people use in the rest of the world. “Instead of Google, we use Baidu. Instead of YouTube, we use Tvix.” The only tool that hasn’t been copied is Gmail – Anti says he can’t imagine it being succesfully copied, due to its high quality. He believes that the most centralized services – like Twitter – won’t succeed in China because they’re so easily censored.

Michael warns us that some other phenomena may not manifest as neatly in China as they have in the West. It’s hard for citizen journalists to do strong investigative work without getting paid… which tends to turn them into journalists, not citizen journalists. The only hope for citizen journalists are “internet kids”, who are employed in tech companies and can write in their free time. Videblogging is also unlikely to catch on as fast, as the tools for posting video are very slow, and the cost of cameras is prohibitively expensive.

“If everything is censored in China, what’s the hope?” Anti tells us that he’s hopeful about free expression via social networks. People can use chatrooms and email to replicate the function of literary journals and reviews like the New York Review of Books. These aren’t mainstream media – they’re elite media – and they can work through Gmail, Gtalk, SMS and instant messaging. In some cases, chatrooms might serve as public news, because it’s easy to be anonymous. But the other tools work on top of social networks of elites.

Anti ends us talk with a challenging argument: “China is not America – it’s a bigger Singapore. That’s not a bad thing – you’ve got money, you can go abroad. But you’re not free to lead a political movement.” The Chinese government, over years, has learned how to control the Internet very effectively. It’s turned it from a tool of free expression into a tool for social monitoring. “In 1989, the government didn’t know why Tiananmen happened. Now, by reading the Internet, they know what’s going to happen. They know about movements in their infancy and they’re able to kill them when they’re still young.”

I referenced this quote when asking Michael a question after his talk. I wanted to know what percentage of Chinese users he thought were interested in getting around censorship and expressing themselves freely online, observing that the rise of the internet in China has already created a great deal more freedom than most Chinese people had a decade ago.

Michael’s response began with a story: “When I first came to America, I thought it was very conservative. In China, it’s easy to have sex before marriage, and we are more open to homosexuals. We have no conservative party, and we have no God.” He asks, “Why does the China government allow people to have so much freedom in sex and business?” The answer is that the government wants to exchange personal freedom for political freedom. You’ve got a life now that’s so much better than your parents’ life was. “There’s a generation gap. The children of the 1970s want social change. They remember Tiananmen. But the newer generation simply accepts this exchange” of political freedoms for personal freedoms. As a result, “only very weird people care about political freedom. At least 95% of people don’t care about censorship.”

Anti says that the Chinese government has suceeded in controling the Internet for the majority of people. “I see no hope of changing this situation.” Where he sees hope is in mobilizing and connecting elites, not in changing how the mainstream sees the internet or politics.

Colin Maclay, who’s been involved with an effort to set standards for US companies doing business in countries that censor the Internet, asks Anti about his thoughts on US companies engaging in China. Anti argues that it’s easy to make decisions that would be “morally clean in Congress”, but would have disastrous impacts on China. “GMail is our everything!” If the US Congress forced Google not to interact with China, it would have terrible impacts on China – the right strategy is to let the Chinese people solve these problems for themselves.

We hear a lot of good talks at Berkman. This was one of the very best I’ve heard in the past year. Glad you’re in Boston, Michael – we’re lucky to have you here for a year.

David’s notes, which go into the question and answer session in much more detail than mine, here.

• Iranian Muslim Bloggers
  Hamid Tehrani offers a very useful window on discussions taking place within Iran’s Islamic blogosphere, which is likely more influential with the government than Iran’s reformist bloggers
  (tags: bloggers iran islam bridgeblogs globalvoices)
• A Little Laptop With Big Ambitions – WSJ.com
  A critical look from the WSJ at the positioning of OLPC against other low-cost computing efforts focused on the developing world. Good perspective on Classmate versus OLPC and the problem of Windows
  (tags: international microsoft news intel olpc technology ict4d developingworld)
• Partnership between schools in Worcester yields a path to college – The Boston Globe
  Inspiring story on a school in inner-city Worcester which is sending a huge proportion of graduates to college, and many to Clark University, which it borders on and leans on heavily for resources and for setting a tone for students
  (tags: education reform uspolitics massachusetts university)
• COVERITLIVE.COM – Home
  Interesting new tool designed for the liveblogging of events that occur in realtime, like sports and political speeches. Still a bit buggy, but very much worth exploring and playing with
  (tags: blogging liveblogging conferences)

Indulge me for a moment here while I play with a hairbrained experiment.

Stephen King’s recent Q&A with Time Magazine’s Gilbert Cruz is getting a good deal of attention on Reddit and other meme-ranking sites, mostly for his suggestion that CNN try a different approach to connecting hard and soft news:

Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture.

King goes on to suggest that Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan should be named Time’s People of the Year as a way of calling attention to the refocusing of mainstream media’s priorities.

I think King’s critique misses the fact that America has been a celebrity culture for a long time, and that it’s always been easier to sell a story with a celebrity hook to it. But a quick search on Google News for the number of stories available about Britney – 12,342 at the moment – was surprising enough to send me back to check some data I’ve been collecting.

For the past few years, I’ve run scripts that poll a number of internet news sites and count the number of stories available on different nations of the world. So I had the data available to very quickly figure out how many stories Google News currently had on different nations of the world, from the US (362,722) to Sao Tome and Principle (84).

If Britney were a nation, she’d be the 60th most reported nation in the world, between Jamaica and Uganda. Lindsay Lohan is receiving far less media attention right now, ranking just below #130, Mozambique. Paris Hilton is marginally less interesting than #90, Ethiopia, though Tom Cruise is just a hair more newsworthy, challenging Yemen for #89.

To break into the top ranks, it helps to run for US President, like Hillary Clinton, who ranks between #24 Singapore and #25 Vietnam. (Not to fear – she beats out Brazil and Saudi Arabia.) Barack Obama is a bit behind, ranking between #30 Switzerland and #31 Netherlands… but far more interesting than #57 Kenya.

While there’s obviously something apples-to-oranges about comparing celebrities and countries, I think there’s some resonance to the idea. Thomas Friedman wrote about “super-empowered individuals” who have the capability to counter-balance nation-states, through their exertion of money, fame, and organizational power. A few weeks ago, I wrote about attention economies and the power of celebrities like Oprah and Bono to redirect the attention associated with their fame to causes.

So perhaps it makes sense – for a while, at least – to run some experiments tracing attention to celebrities as well as to nations. For this, I need some help. I’m using a UN list of nations with populations over 100,000 people; I need a canonical list of celebrities to check against. Should I spider Perez Hilton’s site? Or Forbes’s Celebrity 100? I am celebrity-impaired – please help me figure out what cultural figures are best compared to nation-states.

By the way, Mr. King, waterboarding Jenna Bush isn’t the way to go – there are only 125 stories on her today, putting her below Equatorial Guinea. I hear that Kevin Federline is looking for work – and he ranks between #94 Rwanda and #95 Trinidad and Tobago…

• Business Wire: public relations, press release distribution, investor relations, SEC filing
  Press release from OLPC suggests laptops being purchased at 10,000 a day – OLPC extends give one get one until the end of December
  (tags: charity olpc ict4d)
• Hole in the Wall Project
  A thorough overview of Dr. Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall Project, which invited low-literacy Indian children to learn to use a computer with no formal instruction
  (tags: india ict4d learning education literacy children poverty)
• Cheetah Index
  My friends at African Path launch a new site dedicated to young, innovative Africans focused on market-based solutions to African issues: Cheetah Index, named in honor of George Ayitteh’s African Cheetah idea
  (tags: Africa economics trade microfinance entrepreneurship)

I received one of the most depressing pieces of mail I’ve ever encountered on Tuesday.

I should set the stage by mentioning that I’ve recently had occasion to think about prison reform in the US. I was invited to a meeting by Open Society Institute in New York which looked at some length at the problems of America’s criminal justice system: extremely high rates of incarceration, huge racial disparities in sentencing, and the fact that six of ten African-American high school dropouts ended up in prison by their 30s. Prison reform was a major focus for my father when he was a lawyer with the New York Legal Aid Society, where he primarily defended indigent defendents who had violated the terms of their parole.

I was reading the new study from the JFA Institute titled “Unlocking America“. (A warning – the study is available only as a badly formatted PDF, which lacks key graphs, totals 4.6mb for 40 pages of text, and doesn’t print on my printer. But hey, it’s still worth reading.) The study, authored by several professors of criminology, makes the argument that incarceration isn’t working in America, or at least, isn’t working the way we’d want it to be. Prison populations continue to grow dramatically despite the fact that crime rates have decreased since 1992. (The US is the world’s leader jailer, in both absolute and percentage terms, outdistancing stiff competition from China and Russia, and exceeding incarceration rates of Apartheid-era South Africa.) The study’s authors argue that the increase of prison population is due to a set of “tough on crime” laws passed in the 1970s and 80s that have reduced judge’s flexibility in sentencing and resulted in longer sentences and more court-mandated supervision after release.

While these measures, they argue, don’t meaningfully affect crime rates, they have enormous implications for communities where large numbers of people end up locked out of the workforce due to criminal records, lose the right to vote and have children raised in single-parent (or grandparent) households due to incarcerated parents. Furthermore, the huge costs of keeping indiciduals in prison reduces the amount of tax dollars available to improve life in high crime communities. (Projects like the Justice Mapping Center have done amazing work visualizing the incredible costs associated with incarceration in some neighborhoods and the strong correlation between high incarceration neighborhoods and inadequate social services.)

The report’s authors argue that reducing the massive US prison population requires reforms including:
- the reduction of the length of sentences
- the elimination of prison sentences for “technical offenses” in violating parole or probation. (More than half of all inmates in state prisons have violated parole. More than half of these have committed “technical violations”, which can include missing appointments with parole officers, failing drug tests or failing to pay supervision fees.)
- the reduction of time under parole or probation supervision
- decriminalization of victimless crimes like gambling, prostitution and recreational drug use
- improving prison conditions
- restoring voting rights for convicted felons.

All of which are likely great recommendations, but few of which I can imagine influencing policy debates in the US in the near future. Prison reform hasn’t been one of the hot talking points in the democratic primaries, and it’s hard to imagine Republican candidates who’ve expressed their desire to “double Guantanamo” having serious conversations about improving conditions in US prisons.

So this topic was on my mind when I opened my mail at Berkman and received the report “Cruel and Unusual: Sentencing 13- and 14-Year-Old Children to Die in Prison” from the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based human rights group led by the remarkable Bryan Stephenson, a law professor at NYU. Let’s quickly unpack the report’s title – the children in question aren’t sentenced to execution – they’re sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. There’s aren’t a ton of them – EJI has documented 73 cases of children who are imprisoned until their death based on crimes they were convicted of committing when they were 13 or 14 years old. But the simple fact that children are imprisoned for life based on crimes committed when they were 14 years old or younger is difficult to process.

The EJI report does an excellent job of putting faces on statistics, telling the stories of the children who are now imprisoned for life. One in particular has stuck with me. Antonio Nuñez was 14 years old, drunk and high at a party, when he got into a car with two men who were nearly twice his age. The driver got into a car chase with police and fired shots; the other adult in the car claimed that he’d been kidnapped by the driver. While no one was injured in the chase, the State of California charged Nuñez with aggravated kidnapping, and sentenced him to life in prison without parole, the same sentence the 29-year old driver received.

Antonio Nuñez, right. The youngest person in the US to be sentenced to life in prison for a crime where no one was killed or injured.

Bad things happen to children when you put them in prison with adults. They get raped five times as often as they do in juvenile detention facilities. A substantial proportion of the 73 children documented in the JFI report have attempted suicide. Ian Manuel, sentenced to life in prison for a violent mugging he committed when he was 13, has spent the majority of his life in solitary confinement in a Florida prison. He attempted suicide five times last year.

A broader study, carried out by he University of San Francisco’s Center for Law & Global Justice found 2,387 serving life without parole across the US. 51% of these youth were first-time offenders. 13 states allow youth to be sentenced to life without parole at any age – other states set minimums from age 8 to 14. The US is the only country that allows a 13-year old to be sentenced to life in prison – the punishment is forbidden by the Convention on the Rights of the Child (ratified by all nations except the US and Somalia) forbids it.

In many cases, judges don’t want to impose these sentences – they are required to by mandatory minimum sentence laws. In a large number of cases, the children were represented by deeply incompetent counsel, including counsel who failed to appeal convictions.

The reason this report was so horrific wasn’t the realization that there are 73 people who will die in prison for crimes committed as children. It was the realization that EJI was focusing the campaign on these 73 kids because they belive it might be winnable. In other words, a broader campaign to advocate for all 2,387 sentenced to life in prison while juveniles probably wouldn’t be winnable. And a campaign against the idea of life without parole certainly wouldn’t be winnable in a country where the death penalty is authorized in 38 states and the sentence is offered as a less punitive measure.

The realization that sent me reeling was that EJI’s campaign on this issue is likely to be an uphill battle. The state of Pennsylvania has sentenced 18 children to life in prison for crimes committed when the offender was 13 or 14 – it’s an issue that’s surely been considered in that state’s criminal justice community previously. While it seems impossible for me to find arguments that imprisoning a 13 year old for life is a good idea, I know that people are willing to make these arguments (and perhaps someone will make them in the comments thread.)

While fighting for a reform in sentencing that offers the possibility of parole for people convicted of crimes when they were 14 or under is a battle worth fighting, I’m having a hard time believing that it’s a battle we have to fight. And I wonder what the odds of winning the sorts of reforms advocated in the Unlocking America report are if it’s a battle to fight for the rights of young and badly disadvantaged children who’ve committed crimes.

Then again, it’s very hard to believe that the “debate” on torture in the US has descended to the point where major media outlets won’t call waterboarding “torture”. Or that Amnesty International believes (correctly, I suspect) that they need to show us a performance artist holding the stress positions authorized in CIA interrogation manuals to remind us that stress positions are torture. They do. And EJI needs to force Americans to wrestle with the idea that we imprison 13 year-olds for life before we can wrestle with the implications of imprisoning nearly 1% of our citizens.