A psychological twist on the news.

by Romeo Vitelli, Ph.D.

Loneliness, Chronic Illness, and Growing Older

How can older adults with chronic illness handle depression and loneliness?

Published by Romeo Vitelli, Ph.D. in Media Spotlight Psychology Today

"Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for." Dag Hammarskjold

The mental and physical burden of loneliness can be extreme, especially for older adults. Usually defined as the perception of being isolated from significant others, whether friends or family, people feel lonely because of the gap between the kind of social relationships they would like to have and the ones they see themselves as having. Since nobody's life is ever truly perfect, we all feel lonely from time to time, though the feeling is usually manageable and temporary.

Still, there are numerous studies showing the link between loneliness and the development of health problems, as well having a shorter lifespan. Along with depression and other psychological problems, chronic loneliness can also lead to sleep problems, hypertension, an impaired immune system, and the breakdown of the body's endocrine system.

The problems associated with loneliness often grow worse with time due to the natural health problems that come with age. As a result, loneliness is frequently a chronic problem in older adults due to increasing health problems which can make it harder for them to stay socially active. Age-related medical issues can also lead to greater psychological distress, including depression, and this can lead to people feeling even lonelier. Medical problems such as arthritis, cardiovascular disease, or cancer, can make many older adults feel more disabled and helpless.

Growing older can also lead to a reduction in social support networks, whether through the death or illness of friends and family members, or through major life changes such as divorce or retirement. Losing this kind of emotional support can have a devastating impact on the ability of older adults to cope with stress. In many life-span developmental theories, old age is often the time when older adults are especially vulnerable to loneliness which, along with the strain of coping with chronic illness, could cause them to sink into a downward spiral of depression and despair from which they may never recover.

Along with the challenges that come with age however, there are also effective coping strategies that can help protect older adults and keep them from sinking into this downward spiral. According to the motivational theory of lifespan development proposed by Jutta Heckhausen and her colleagues, people can cope with stress life changes by engaging in either goal engagement strategies or self-protective strategies to build up a sense of control over their lives.

Goal-engagement involves expending time and energy to accomplish specific goals, whether through learning new skills or learning to compensate for health problems that may keep them from familiar activities. Using goal-engagement strategies also means finding the motivation to overcome obstacles instead of sinking into apathy or feeling helpless.

This in turn leads into the need for self-protective strategies to cope with the stress that can come with life changes. By recognizing the difference between attainable and unattainable goals, older adults can mentally prepare themselves to handle emotional distress, whether by reassuring themselves about their ability to accomplish realistic goals or by "disengaging" themselves from goals which are no longer attainable. As people grow older, accepting physical limitations and learning to compensate for them can be an important part of living well, even with chronic illness.

As one example, older adults who develop serious heart problems may become afraid of engaging in any sort of physical exertion, including sex, for fear that what might happen. Learning to accept these limitations and finding ways to work around them, whether by starting new hobbies that are less physically exhausting or finding new ways to do enjoyable activities can be an important part of staying active. Along with learning to attain health-related goals, it is also essential to overcome the low self-esteem and feelings of depression that can lead to becoming more isolated.

Overall, the kind of control strategies we use are going to change with time and our physical ability to handle what is happening to us. It can also mean the difference between an active life and sinking into isolation. But how effect are these strategies going to be? A new research study published in the journal Health Psychology presents the results of an eight-year longitudinal study looking at the link between chronic illness and feelings of loneliness in older adults. Conducted by Carsten Wrosch of Concordia University and a team of fellow researchers, the study used information taken from the Montreal Aging and Health Study (MAHS).

Beginning in 2004, the MAHS studied two hundred and fifteen adults, aged sixty and older, to learn how they cope with common, age-related problems. The study was conducted with repeated assessments every two years from 2004 to 2012. Because of people dropping out due to health problems or other reasons, only one hundred and twenty-one participants were included in the final analysis. On average, participants were seventy-one years old when the study began. The participants completed questionnaires on loneliness, health, demographic factors, and lifestyle choices. Personality factors such as self-esteem, neuroticism, and optimism were also measured.

To measure health engagement control strategies, participants completed a questionnaire with items such as : "I invest as much time as possible to improve my health;" "When I decide to do something about a health problem, I am confident that I will achieve it;" and "When a treatment doesn't work for a health problem I have, I try hard to find out about other treatments." Health-related self-protective strategies were measured through items such as "Even if my health is in very difficult condition, I can find something positive in life;" "When I am faced with a bad health problem, I try to look at the bright side of things;" and "When I find it impossible to overcome a health problem, I try not to blame myself."

What the researchers found was that perceived loneliness increased steadily over time and most participants reported having at least one chronic illness. Both of these findings matched what has been reported in previous research studies and suggest that there is a direct relationship between aging and loneliness as well as chronic illness. Not surprisingly, chronic loneliness was highest for older adults with a history of health problems.

Though the trend towards greater feelings of loneliness as we grow older appears strong, especially if we develop chronic health problems as well, it is still possible to protect ourselves. Based on the results of this study, using self-protective strategies to cope with health problems seems to help people with chronic illness deal with the emotional distress linked to loneliness. By reappraising their lives in positive ways and recognizing that they are not responsible for their illness, older adults can adapt to new health threats as they occur.

Positive reappraisal is especially effective in helping people to recognize that they are still capable of enjoying life in spite of their health problems. It also provides them with the confidence to try new things and develop new hobbies that can help them stay socially active. By avoiding self-blame, older adults can also protect themselves from the depression and feelings of helplessness that are often seen in chronic illness.

While self-protective strategies appear effective in dealing with loneliness, health-engagement strategies may not be as useful. Still, health-engagement strategies can also play an important role in managing health though this can change over time as health problems become more severe.

Overall, the researchers found that self-protection strategies can work well in curbing loneliness even when differences in personality, amount of actual disability, or depression were taken into account. These study results can have important implications for how older adults with health problems can manage loneliness and depression. It also demonstrates the need for teaching effective coping techniques to manage the psychological problems linked to living with chronic illness. While many older adults experience greater problems in emotional well-being as they grow older, learning to live with inevitable health problems is the key to a long and productive life.

We are currently looking at one of the largest demographic shifts in history with one out of every three Americans being fifty years or older. One out of every eight Americans is now considered "old" and make up 12.9 percent of the total population. By 2030, one out of every five people will be sixty-five or older and our health care system will be strained to the bursting point (and beyond) caring for them.

With the rising number of older adults living in the community, it is more essential than ever that we explore different forms of psychological training to help them to stay active as long as possible. Helping older adults manage their own physical and emotional health represents a vital investment in the future.

Romeo Vitelli, Ph.D. is a psychologist in private practice in Toronto, Canada.

Biology | Evolution FROM NAUTILUS

The Strange Inevitability of Evolution

Good solutions to biology’s problems are astonishingly plentiful.

By Philip Ball

Is the natural world creative? Just take a look around it. Look at the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the diverse pattern and shape of leaves, the cunning stratagems of microbes, the dazzling profusion of climbing, crawling, flying, swimming things. Look at the "grandeur" of life, the "endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful," as Darwin put it. Isn’t that enough to persuade you?

Ah, but isn’t all this wonder simply the product of the blind fumbling of Darwinian evolution, that mindless machine which takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection? Well, not quite. You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive. "Darwin’s theory surely is the most important intellectual achievement of his time, perhaps of all time," says evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner of the University of Zurich. "But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded his theory. And he couldn’t even get close to solving it."

What Wagner is talking about is how evolution innovates: as he puts it, "how the living world creates." Natural selection supplies an incredibly powerful way of pruning variation into effective solutions to the challenges of the environment. But it can’t explain where all that variation came from. As the biologist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1905, "natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest." Over the past several years, Wagner and a handful of others have been starting to understand the origins of evolutionary innovation. Thanks to their findings so far, we can now see not only how Darwinian evolution works but why it works: what makes it possible.

A popular misconception is that all it takes for evolution to do something new is a random mutation of a gene—a mistake made as the gene is copied from one generation to the next, say. Most such mutations make things worse—the trait encoded by the gene is less effective for survival—and some are simply fatal. But once in a blue moon (the argument goes) a mutation will enhance the trait, and the greater survival prospects of the lucky recipient will spread that beneficial mutation through the population.

The trouble is that traits don’t in general map so neatly onto genes: They arise from interactions between many genes that regulate one another’s activity in complex networks, or "gene circuits." No matter, you might think: Evolution has plenty of time, and it will find the "good" gene circuits eventually. But the math says otherwise.

Take, for example, the discovery within the field of evolutionary developmental biology that the different body plans of many complex organisms, including us, arise not from different genes but from different networks of gene interaction and expression in the same basic circuit, called the Hox gene circuit. To get from a snake to a human, you don’t need a bunch of completely different genes, but just a different pattern of wiring in essentially the same kind of Hox gene circuit. For these two vertebrates there are around 40 genes in the circuit. If you take account of the different ways that these genes might regulate one another (for example, by activation or suppression), you find that the number of possible circuits is more than 10700. That’s a lot, lot more than the number of fundamental particles in the observable universe. What, then, are the chances of evolution finding its way blindly to the viable "snake" or "human" traits (or phenotypes) for the Hox gene circuit? How on earth did evolution manage to rewire the Hox network of a Cambrian fish to create us?

Exactly which genes you have may not matter so much (within reason), because the job they do is more a property of the network in which they are embedded.

The galaxy of gene circuits isn’t the only mind-bogglingly immense terrain that evolution has to navigate in order to innovate. The same issues apply, for example, to metabolic networks. Organisms have had to find ways of getting their energy from whatever fuel happens to be on hand—typically the metabolisms of microorganisms run on compounds such as glucose, ethanol, or citrate. Ideally, their metabolic machinery of enzymes would run on more than just one of these, so that they’d have more options for survival. But how easy is it to adapt to other fuels? Even for a relatively small list of common metabolic fuels, the number of possible metabolisms of this sort is again astronomical.

The same explosion of combinatorial options happens for proteins, which are molecules made up of many tens to hundreds of amino acids bound together in chains and folded up into particular molecular shapes. There are 20 different amino acids found in natural proteins, and for proteins just 100 amino acids long (which are small ones) the number of permutations is 10130. Yet the 4 billion years of evolution so far have provided only enough time to create around 1050 different proteins. So how on earth has it managed to find ones that work?

Finally there’s RNA. This molecule, once considered the mere go-between in converting a sequence of chemical building blocks in a gene (called base pairs) into a sequence of amino acids in a protein that catalyses a biochemical reaction, is now afforded much more status. For one thing, because RNA molecules can imitate both genes, by encoding information in a sequence, and proteins, by folding up into shapes that act as chemical catalysts, RNA is the best candidate for the multi-tasking molecules that orchestrated the earliest life. What’s more, we now know that RNA molecules are important regulators of gene activity: Some genes interact with others via the RNA molecules they encode, which can act as switches to turn the expression of other genes up or down. Yet evolutionary innovation with RNA also faces an absurd profusion of combinatorial choices.

In all these cases the questions are the same, and point to, as Wagner puts it, a "dirty secret" behind the success of the so-called modern synthesis of Darwinian evolutionary theory and genetics. How does evolution find workable solutions when it lacks the means to explore even a small fraction of the options? And how does evolution find its way from an existing solution to a viable new one—how does it create? The answer is, at least in part, a simple one: It’s easier than it looks. But only because the landscape that the evolutionary process explores has a remarkable structure, and one that neither Darwin nor his successors who merged Darwinism with genetics had anticipated.

Casting a billion nets

One of the first people to begin exploring how evolution creates was the Austrian scientist Peter Schuster. (He is one of those researchers whom one has to label simply "scientist" because it is impossible to decide if he is a physicist, chemist, or biologist.) Because of his interest in the possibility that life began with RNA—in the so-called RNA world—in the 1970s Schuster began to explore what RNAs could do. To act as a catalyst, an RNA molecule needs to fold into the right shape. As with a protein, this shape is determined by the molecule’s sequence of building blocks. In effect this is a genotype-to-phenotype question, with the genotype being the RNA’s sequence and the phenotype its folded shape. The phenotype determines how equipped an organism is for its environment, and it is where selection acts. That selection is ultimately registered in the genotype—the genes that allow a trait to be passed to offspring—but the connection between phenotype and genotype retains many mysteries. Arguably it is the biggest mystery of the post-genomic era we are now entering, in which it is proving unexpectedly hard to identify where many inherited phenotypic traits are encoded in the genotype.

In the 1990s Schuster and his colleagues devised a computer program that could predict the simplest features of an RNA’s shape (its secondary structure, which is how parts of the chain stick to other parts by pairing-up of bases) from its sequence. For an RNA of 100 bases, there are around 1023 possible shapes of this sort. But what was remarkable was the way these shapes and their sequences were related.

Naively, you might expect RNAs with a similar shape, and thus presumably phenotype, to share a similar sequence, so that a map of the possible sequences—the sequence space, which can be represented as a many-dimensional space where each grid point corresponds to a particular sequence—is divided up into various "shape kingdoms" (See Not a Patch, a). But that wasn’t what Schuster found. Instead, RNAs with the same shape could vary very widely in sequence: You could get the same shape, and therefore potentially the same kind of catalytic function, from very different sequences. But these phenotypic siblings weren’t totally isolated from one another in distant parts of the sequence space. Instead, RNAs with the same kind of shape were connected in a network that weaved its way throughout pretty much the whole of sequence space. You could go from one sequence to another with the same shape (and thus much the same function) via a succession of small changes to the sequence, as if proceeding through a rail network station by station. Such changes are called neutral mutations, because they are neither adaptively beneficial nor detrimental. (In fact even if mutations are not strictly neutral but slightly decrease fitness, as many do, they can persist for a long time in a population as if they were quasi-neutral.)

And this was the case for all the 1023 possible shapes. In other words, this RNA sequence space is threaded with that number of interwoven networks, all interlocking but rarely intersecting. This means that if we consider any given sequence at a particular point in the high-dimensional space, it has a huge number of neighboring sequences that have completely different shapes—and yet it can still mutate step by step into a very different sequence with a similar function, provided that it stays on the right track (See Not a Patch, b).

Not a Patch: The shape of RNA sequence space is not divided into phenotypic patches, where each color represents a different shape or phenotype (a), but is permeated by phenotypic networks that extend and interweave throughout almost the whole space (b). Each network can be traversed by a series of individual neutral mutations to the sequence.

This tells us two crucial things about the RNA sequence space. First, there are many, many possible sequences that will all serve the same function. If evolution is "searching" for that function by natural selection, it has an awful lot of viable solutions to choose from. Second, the space, while unthinkably vast and multi-dimensional, is navigable: You can change the genotype neutrally, without losing the all-important phenotype. So this is why the RNAs are evolvable at all: not because evolution has the time to sift through the impossibly large number of variations to find the ones that work, but because there are so many that do work, and they’re connected to one another.

Susanna Manrubia of the Spanish National Center for Biotechnology has conducted more sophisticated computational studies of how RNA sequence dictates secondary structure, which support this view that there is a lot of redundancy in the genotype-phenotype map.1 She thinks this feature of RNA might have been crucial for its proposed role in the origin of life. "The existence of multiple genotypic solutions, together with a tolerance to exact molecular structures to perform chemical functions, might have been essential in the emergence of an RNA world," she says.

Proteins have this property too. Different organisms often possess proteins with the same shape and enzymatic function (phenotype), yet typically these will share no more than 20 percent of their amino acids in common. Using a simple model of protein structures, David Lipman and W. John Wilbur of the National Institutes of Health in Maryland showed in 1991 why this should be so: Their simplified model proteins were linked into extended networks in sequence space that can be traversed by neutral mutations one step at a time. In 2001 this apparent redundancy between protein sequence and phenotype was demonstrated experimentally by Anthony Keefe and Jack Szostak at Harvard University. They set out to look for proteins made from randomly assembled amino acids that could bind to the small molecule called ATP, which is the key energy-storage molecule of living cells. Just about any protein that does useful work, such as transporting other molecules or catalyzing their transformation into new forms, uses ATP as the energy source. ATP-binders are therefore vital components of cells. Szostak and Keefe used a chemical method to assemble 80-amino-acid proteins at random from their component parts, and were able to sift through all the variants that they made to find ones that happened to be aptly shaped to bind ATP.2 They couldn’t make anything like the total number of possible permutations of this number of amino acids. But among the tiny fraction (6 trillion) that they did produce, they found four ATP binders. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but if there are already four solutions in this incredibly small sampling of the sequence space, there must be an immense number in the rest of the space—about 1093 of them, the researchers estimated.

This suggests that evolvability, and the corollary of creativity or innovability, is a fundamental feature of complex networks like those found in biology.

Wagner and his coworkers have discovered that this "evolvable" (they call it a robust) structure is a common feature of biological complexity. In 2006 he and his postdoc João Rodrigues began to explore the versatility of the metabolic network of the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli).3 This is perhaps the most studied of all bacteria, and the biochemical pathways of its metabolism are well mapped out. E. coli consumes glucose and makes from it all 60 or so of the key molecular building blocks it needs to survive. But what if just one of those metabolic reactions was altered? Could these "neighbors" of E. coli still survive on glucose alone? There is a huge number of such neighbors, but Wagner and Rodrigues calculated the metabolic reactions for more than 1,000 of them, and found that several hundred will also make do with glucose alone. In other words, E. coli’s metabolic network is not finely tuned to run on glucose—lots of other variants will work too. The researchers continued to search through the metabolic space, asking whether neighbors of neighbors would also run on glucose. They found that they could just keep on walking through this network of viable glucose-metabolizers until they reached hypothetical organisms that shared only 20 percent of the reactions with E. coli. Again, the options are extremely numerous, and all reachable by small neutral steps through the space of possibilities. Evolution sends vast numbers of organisms off to explore this intricately ordered library, seeking good answers to life’s problems. As they stumbled upon this unexpected topology of "metabolic space," says Wagner, "I was close to ecstatic."

And gene circuits? Same story. Wagner has collaborated with physicist Olivier Martin to explore the space of hypothetical gene regulatory networks. They searched for different networks that, by mutually regulating the activity of the constituent genes, would produce the same overall patterns of gene expression— that is, the same phenotype.4 To take a trivial example, in a network of three genes A, B, and C, the same result of switching off expression of gene B could be achieved by either A or C inhibiting B. Even for just a dozen or so genes the number of possible networks of interactions becomes too vast for an exhaustive search, and so the researchers could examine only a tiny region of the space. But the outcome was clear: On the one hand, circuits typically have dozens to hundreds of neighbors with the same phenotype, while on the other hand circuits that differed in more than 90 percent of their "wires" could still produce the same expression pattern.

This helps to explain a puzzling aspect of gene circuits: their robustness. In the late 1990s a team of researchers at Stanford University created around 6,000 mutants of brewer’s yeast, each of them lacking a different single gene, and found that many of them thrived just as well as the unmutated yeast did.5 The same proves to be true for many other organisms: You can obliterate many of their individual genes to no obvious effect. But this is no surprise if there are plenty of similar gene circuits that do much the same job as the original one. Looked at this way, robustness is complementary to innovation: Any network that can evolve new features and forms among a vast array of alternatives must necessarily be robust against small changes, because it almost certainly has an alternative on hand that performs equally well. This realization offers an antidote to an excessively deterministic view of genes: Exactly which genes you have may not matter so much (within reason), because the job they do is more a property of the network in which they are embedded.

Wagner’s work is "really innovative—no pun intended—and important stuff," says Johannes Jaeger of the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain. He is trying to test these ideas by studying the evolution and developmental biology of gene networks that control the growth of insects such as fruit flies. "So far, our results agree with Andreas’ insights," Jaeger says. They have found that manipulating this network to switch between sequential and simultaneous formation of the segments of a fly’s body is much easier to achieve than expected—it just needs a few tweaks of the regulatory mechanisms, not a wholesale reorganization of genes. "This explains much of the differences in expression patterns in different fly species," says Jaeger. "All kinds of patterns can be produced by the same set of genes."

Is evolution a law of nature?

These findings uncover a property of biological systems even deeper than the evolutionary processes that shape them. They reveal the landscape on which that shaping took place, and they show that it was only possible at all because the landscape has a very specific topology, in which functionally similar combinations of the component parts—genes, metabolites, protein or nucleic-acid sequences—are connected into vast webs that stretch throughout the whole of the multidimensional space, each intricately woven amidst countless others.

One might argue that the original creative act of the living world was the generation of the components themselves: the chemical ingredients, such as amino acids and sugars, that comprise the molecules of life. But this now seems like the easy part, the kind of happy accident that chemistry can supply given the right raw materials and environment. The harder question is how one can get beyond that passive soup to kick-start Darwinian evolution. Manrubia thinks that this primal creative step might itself be a consequence of the richness and intimate interweaving of neutral (or quasi-neutral) networks. This means that, even for random, abiotically generated RNA sequences, there is a significant chance of finding ones that perform some useful function. "In a sense, you have function for free if the phenotypes are sufficiently represented in sequence space," she says. And her computer simulations show that such RNA sequences aren’t rare. "So sufficiently good solutions to act as seeds of the evolutionary process might arise in the absence of the evolutionary process itself." In particular, there’s a fair chance of hitting on sequences that can replicate—and then you’re up and running. "Natural selection can very quickly turn mediocre solutions into fully adaptive ones," Manrubia says.

These ideas suggest that evolvability and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information itself.

The structure of these combinatorial landscapes of biomolecules then enables nature to make bold and creative innovations rather than being forever consigned to making incremental variations on what already exists. Evolution need only take a random walk along a web of neutral (or at least almost neutral) mutations, that, without impairing the fitness of an organism, surrounds it with very different neighbors: innovative solutions to selective pressures that are there for the taking when the circumstances compel it. Through this neutral drift, organisms can reach locations in phase space which would not have been accessible by strictly adaptive mutation from their original starting position.

The role of such random drift in evolution has been long recognized, and recently evolutionary biologist John Tyler Bonner has argued that it may be more important than previously thought, especially for small organisms whose wide variety of shapes and structures—think of the microscopic marine organisms such as diatoms and radiolarians—do not necessarily reflect any adaptive fine-tuning.6 The apparent creativity and artistry of such forms has astonished biologists and inspired artists. Now it seems we can understand where this diversity and inventiveness comes from.

Nature’s creativity: Some radiolarians as drawn by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel at the end of the 19th century, showing the dazzling profusion of their variety. Ernst Haeckel

What is more, the new perspective offered by the work of Wagner and others might resolve long-standing disputes about the apparent conflict between the fitness of populations and individuals. Some bacteria seem to undergo more mutations than is "wise" for the individual, if most mutations decrease fitness. An overly simplistic explanation is that many mutations are nonetheless good for the population as a whole because they offer more options for adapting to new environmental challenges. But mutations on robust networks have more chance of being neutral—a feature that is good both for the individual (because it has less chance of incurring deleterious mutations) and for the population (because it provides new ways to adapt when the need arises).7

Yet the question that remains is: Why does the space of evolutionary options have this essential, robust structure? "We simply don’t know why genotype networks are interwoven the way they are," admits Wagner. Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, a specialist on protein evolution, suggests that perhaps that question is back to front: "One could posit that evolution is only able to work effectively if this property exists, and so the things that ended up evolving have this property," he says. But he admits that this would be hard to prove.

However, it seems likely that the answer lies beyond biology. Karthik Raman, a former postdoc in Wagner’s lab, now at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, has studied much the same issues of functional equivalence of different circuits not for genes but for electronic components that carry out binary logic functions. By randomly rewiring circuits of 16 components and figuring out which of them will perform particular logic operations, Raman found that they too have this evolvable topology.8 But crucially, this property appeared only if the circuits were complex enough—if they had too few components, small changes destroyed their function. "The more complex they are, the more rewiring they tolerate," says Wagner. Not only does this open up possibilities for electronic circuit design using Darwinian principles, but it suggests that evolvability, and the corollary of creativity or innovability, is a fundamental feature of complex networks like those found in biology.

Manrubia agrees that complexity is the key. "It seems clear that efficient navigability can only be achieved in genotype spaces of high dimensionality," she says. That simply puts more options in reach—because you have more directions to reach in. "As the number of possible neighbors of a sequence increases, the likelihood that some of those neighbors has a viability comparable to the original one grows." One consequence, she says, is that there could be an adaptive imperative favoring larger genomes, at least for organisms inhabiting varying environments: That way, you gain more in robustness than you lose in the labor of replicating and maintaining a lot of DNA.

These ideas suggest that evolvability and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information itself. That is a view long championed by Schuster’s sometime collaborator, Nobel laureate chemist Manfred Eigen, who insists that Darwinian evolution is not merely the organizing principle of biology but a "law of physics," an inevitable result of how information is organized in complex systems. And if that’s right, it would seem that the appearance of life was not a fantastic fluke but almost a mathematical inevitability.

Philip Ball is the author of Invisible: The Dangerous Allure of the Unseen and many books on science and art.

Another World

Paris’s Muslim Suburbs Blame Jews for Charlie

DANA KENNEDY Daily Beast

In France, the projects don’t look like ghettoes, but they’re filled with a poisonous mix of conspiracy theories and a some support for murderous jihadis.

SEVRAN, France — As more than 1.5 million people, including 40 world leaders, converged on Paris on Sunday to rally for unity after terrorist attacks that left 17 innocent people dead, three young men in tracksuits and hoodies lounged outside a fast-food restaurant 10 miles north of the city in Sevran, one of France’s poorest suburbs.

Mehdi Boular, 24, who said he was married with two children, and two of his friends, did not attend Sunday’s rally.

"We’re Muslims," Boular said. "They might have killed us if we’d gone."

But even though the flags of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia were flying at the rally in Place de la République and Muslims were well represented among the marchers Sunday, Boular said the attacks in Paris were part of a plot masterminded by Jewish conspirators.

"The Kalashnikovs, the identity cards the [killers] supposedly left behind, it was all staged," said Boular, as his friends nodded in agreement. "It was a conspiracy designed by the Jews to make Muslims look bad. We’d rather just stay where we are."

No use arguing. No use pointing out that one of the terrorists murdered four Jews. Conspiracy theories have their own unassailable logic, and this is a world apart from the displays of unity in Paris after the carnage of last week. French newspapers reported that some students in these neighborhoods—as well as other heavily Muslim areas near cities like Lille—refused to participate in Thursday’s national moment of silence for the victims of the terror attacks. One teacher said up to 80 percent of his students didn’t want to observe the silence, and some said they supported the attackers. "You reap what you sow," a student who refused the moment of silence told his teacher in reference to the terrorists’ victims, according to Le Figaro.

Sevran is one of the many notorious banlieues just outside Paris that are home largely to second- and third-generation immigrants from former French colonies in North and West Africa. The town is studded with cement and brick public housing, mostly built in the 1960s and ’70s. Unemployment rates are as high as 35 to 40 percent. Sevran often is lumped in with places like Saint-Denis and nearby Clichy-sous-Bois, the epicenter of weeks of rioting and car burning in 2005. Riots here back in the summer of 1981 led to some of the first mass demonstrations to illustrate the plight of immigrant Algerians, Tunisians, and Moroccans in France.

He called the Paris terrorist attacks "un complot," or conspiracy, and launched into a lengthy explanation of the "magical Jews" behind it.

The 19th arrondissement in Paris has also become synonymous with immigrant frustration and despair after it became known that the Kouachi brothers, Chérif and Saïd, who died in a hail of gunfire last week after killing 12 people, including eight journalists at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine, moved there as teenagers and were recruited by a jihadi network. Born in France, the Kouachis were the orphaned sons of Algerian parents.

The popular narrative is that France’s minority populations, specifically those of North African descent, are marginalized and isolated in what are invariably called "gritty," or "hardscrabble" areas. Shunned by the French majority, reports often say, the children of North African immigrants are frustrated and resentful because they are blocked from traditional routes of advancement.

But many of the Parisian banlieues appear to an outsider much tamer than gun-ridden American ghettoes and bear no resemblance to, say, a typical favela in Rio de Janeiro or the mafia-run Scampia ghetto in Naples. Much of the 19th arrondissement in Paris, where Cherif Kouachi joined the Buttes-Chaumont terror network 10 years ago, looks about as rundown and sketchy today as Brooklyn’s Park Slope.

Indeed at the McDonalds in Sevran, called one of the most dangerous towns in France, the floor is so clean you can almost eat off it and the server actually brings your hamburger and French fries to you in a pristine booth.

"A lot of what you hear about how bad it is here is just not true," says Pathe Ndiay, 29, whose parents are Senegalese but who was born in France. Ndiay works as a security guard in Sevran and lives nearby. "There’s a lot of unemployment here but not that many young people are out looking for jobs."

Ndiay said many young men in the banlieues prefer the easy money they can get selling drugs rather than seeking what is likely to be boring, poorly paid employment in Paris.

"They don’t want to be bothered with getting a job," Ndiay said. "Some can make up to €1,000 to €2,000 a day selling drugs. They want to be rappers. They don’t want to start at some boring job and work their way up the ladder."

When Boular and his friends were asked if they were looking for work, they said yes. "We try every day," said one of his friends, who did not want to give his name, but then he started laughing and his friends joined in. They stand in front of McDonalds in Sevran, Boular said, pretty much all day and well into the middle of the night. Boular said he runs home "every now and then" to see his wife and children.

Boular said he recently was released from prison after a two-year sentence for involvement with a car theft. He says he was beaten by guards frequently because he was an Arab. Boular said he and his friends are "blocked" from advancing in French society because they are Arabs and added that his only dream is to "go to Miami and be a rapper and drive a jet-ski."

A cross-section of young men interviewed in several suburbs last week, including Sevran, Saint-Denis, and Paris’s 19th arrondissement, all spoke of being devout Muslims. None said they supported the Kouachi brothers or their associate Ahmed Coulibaly, who killed four hostages at a kosher supermarket in Paris on Friday, although they all believed the cartoonists at the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine did not have the right to caricature the prophet Muhammad.

Many spoke out against Israel and Jews as well as the United States but did not seem to have much of a grasp of geopolitics nor did they appear to be very religious in the traditional sense of the word.

Another young man of French-Algerian descent interviewed outside a gas station in the Saint-Denis suburb reacted angrily to a reporter’s presence and demanded to know her religion. "The worst thing is to be atheist," he said.

The man, who gave his named as "Mohamed," also said he was a devout Muslim but then changed his demeanor and added, grinning, that he was also "a delinquent." Then he said he was a drug dealer and without prompting, invited the reporter into the (also very clean) gas station to show an array of hashish for sale in broad daylight on a shelf next to the ATM.

He also called the Paris terrorist attacks "un complot," or conspiracy, and launched into a lengthy explanation of the "magical Jews" behind it. They were not ordinary Jews, he said, but a "hybrid race of shape shifters" who have extraordinary abilities. "They know how to get in everywhere," he said. "They are master manipulators."

Mouhanad Khorchide, a professor of Islamic pedagogy at the University of Munster in Germany told The New York Times last week that while he sees many young Muslims identifying more strongly with their religion he considers it a "hollow religiosity."

"They would say, ‘Islam is really important for me,’ but they had just dealt drugs," Khorchide said. "They had a Quran in their backpack and said, ‘With the Quran, I am strong.’ But if you asked if they had read it or knew what it contained, they said no.’"

A French-Algerian named Bentaha Tahar, 30, and his friend who gave his name as Alouane, 31, stood outside Danny Hills restaurant in the 19th arrondissement, right across from the Buttes Chaumont park where Cherif Kouachi received early jihadi training from a charismatic janitor from the nearby Addawa mosque. Mothers pushing babies in expensive strollers and joggers of all ages filled the large, green quite beautiful park.

"The Kouachis insulted Islam," Tahar said. "They had no right to do what they did. It is against our religion. People need to understand that."

At the same time, the two grew very heated when they spoke of the resentment they said many French Algerians feel about the United States "and the powers behind it."

"The Americans are very naïve," Alouane said. "They get all caught up in a story like this but they don’t see what their own government is doing every day, every week, every year. What right do they have to go out and start wars? The answer is they have no right. They’re out to grab money and power and they always have been."

Leelah Alcorn’s Last Words

If you are reading this, it means that I have committed suicide and obviously failed to delete this post from my queue.

Please don’t be sad, it’s for the better. The life I would’ve lived isn’t worth living in… because

I’m transgender. I could go into detail explaining why I feel that way, but this note is probably going to be lengthy enough as it is. To put it simply, I feel like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and I’ve felt that way ever since I was 4. I never knew there was a word for that feeling, nor was it possible for a boy to become a girl, so I never told anyone and I just continued to do traditionally "boyish" things to try to fit in.

When I was 14, I learned what transgender meant and cried of happiness. After 10 years of confusion I finally understood who I was. I immediately told my mom, and she reacted extremely negatively, telling me that it was a phase, that I would never truly be a girl, that God doesn’t make mistakes, that I am wrong. If you are reading this, parents, please don’t tell this to your kids. Even if you are Christian or are against transgender people don’t ever say that to someone, especially your kid. That won’t do anything but make them hate them self. That’s exactly what it did to me.

My mom started taking me to a therapist, but would only take me to christian therapists, (who were all very biased) so I never actually got the therapy I needed to cure me of my depression. I only got more christians telling me that I was selfish and wrong and that I should look to God for help.

When I was 16 I realized that my parents would never come around, and that I would have to wait until I was 18 to start any sort of transitioning treatment, which absolutely broke my heart. The longer you wait, the harder it is to transition. I felt hopeless, that I was just going to look like a man in drag for the rest of my life. On my 16th birthday, when I didn’t receive consent from my parents to start transitioning, I cried myself to sleep.

I formed a sort of a "fuck you" attitude towards my parents and came out as gay at school, thinking that maybe if I eased into coming out as trans it would be less of a shock. Although the reaction from my friends was positive, my parents were pissed. They felt like I was attacking their image, and that I was an embarrassment to them. They wanted me to be their perfect little straight christian boy, and that’s obviously not what I wanted.

So they took me out of public school, took away my laptop and phone, and forbid me of getting on any sort of social media, completely isolating me from my friends. This was probably the part of my life when I was the most depressed, and I’m surprised I didn’t kill myself. I was completely alone for 5 months. No friends, no support, no love. Just my parent’s disappointment and the cruelty of loneliness.

At the end of the school year, my parents finally came around and gave me my phone and let me back on social media. I was excited, I finally had my friends back. They were extremely excited to see me and talk to me, but only at first. Eventually they realized they didn’t actually give a shit about me, and I felt even lonelier than I did before. The only friends I thought I had only liked me because they saw me five times a week.

After a summer of having almost no friends plus the weight of having to think about college, save money for moving out, keep my grades up, go to church each week and feel like shit because everyone there is against everything I live for, I have decided I’ve had enough. I’m never going to transition successfully, even when I move out. I’m never going to be happy with the way I look or sound. I’m never going to have enough friends to satisfy me. I’m never going to have enough love to satisfy me. I’m never going to find a man who loves me. I’m never going to be happy. Either I live the rest of my life as a lonely man who wishes he were a woman or I live my life as a lonelier woman who hates herself. There’s no winning. There’s no way out. I’m sad enough already, I don’t need my life to get any worse. People say "it gets better" but that isn’t true in my case. It gets worse. Each day I get worse.

That’s the gist of it, that’s why I feel like killing myself. Sorry if that’s not a good enough reason for you, it’s good enough for me. As for my will, I want 100% of the things that I legally own to be sold and the money (plus my money in the bank) to be given to trans civil rights movements and support groups, I don’t give a shit which one. The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was, they’re treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year. I want someone to look at that number and say "that’s fucked up" and fix it. Fix society. Please.

Goodbye,

(Leelah) Josh Alcorn

The Radical Power of a Prison Pen Pal

By Maya Schenwar  TPM

　

The term "pen pal"—sweetly alliterative and quaint—may evoke images of doomed summer camp relationships, international exchange student assignments, and 1950s schoolgirls writing letters to soldiers with fountain pens. But in this country, which locks up more than 2.4 million people and enjoys the title of most incarcerated nation in the world, the practice of pen-palling takes on a pragmatic purpose: It links those behind bars to the outside world.

Over the past eight years, I’ve corresponded with a couple of dozen pen pals in prison. The "use" of pen-palship has made itself visible in small and large ways over the course of these loosely threaded friendships. Sometimes, a piercing phrase will spring up out of the envelope—a truth that will never leave my mind. At other times, a prisoner will contribute a vital bit of information that proves unavailable anywhere else. Often, though, the "use" of pen-palship is not in the particulars of what is being communicated, but in the act of communicating.

Prison is built on a logic of isolation and disconnection. Letters between pen pals are almost always exchanged for the opposite purpose and with the opposite effect: connection.

The act of pen-palling mirrors the mindset shift that will be necessary to rethink how our society "does justice" on a much larger scale. My conversations, correspondences, and relationships with prison-torn families have taught me that separation breeds more separation, that the coldness and isolation of prison breed the coldness and isolation of violence. And I think about how the one-on-one relationship, in which the prisoner emerges as a person (with thoughts, a personality, a history, hopes, dreams, nightmares), might serve as a model for the beginnings of a person-based, connection-based justice system.

In early 2006, I began working on a piece on prison-based activism for the music and politics magazine Punk Planet. I wanted to write about action happening on the inside, action that might not be getting any attention beyond the walls, and I began writing to people in prison to find out what they were thinking. I soon developed an ongoing correspondence with my first prison pen pal, Steven Michael Woods, who was on death row in Texas. Steven was leading a hunger strike to advocate for more humane—or, at least, marginally tolerable—conditions. Addressing the envelope ("Polunsky Unit," death row) scared me. My image of Steven was murky and amorphous, a silent symbol of the media label routinely slapped on death row prisoners: "worst of the worst." However, the day I received my first letter from this man, I came to the jarring, thudding realization that he was human. Not Inmate No. 1267, but the person, Steven Woods.

Steven was 26, two years older than me. (He was arrested at 21.) He worshipped nineties underground rock and had played bass and guitar for "beer party punk bands" in past days. His politics were passionate—and, incredibly, more hopeful than mine: He wrote of his belief in the power of nonviolent resistance to "help our fellows rise above their chains," even in the direst of circumstances.

The day I received my first letter, I came to the jarring, thudding realization that he was human.

To top it off, he’d been an avid Punk Planet reader before he was locked up—he could name cover stories from 2001. He claimed he was innocent: His co-defendant, whose fingerprints were found on the weapons, had confessed to being the sole shooter in the murder. No physical evidence against Steven was ever discovered, although he did acknowledge being at the scene of the crime. (I neither questioned nor affirmed Steven’s innocence throughout our correspondence, but I did go online and read, over and over, flooded with grief, anger, and confusion, the gory details of the murder he was said to have committed.) Now, he woke each morning sweating uncontrollably, hit with the stark inevitability of his impending death.

In his first letter to me, Steven shared that he was working on a zine—a handwritten, self-produced magazine filled with rants and comics—entitled "The Continuing Struggle of a Nail in My Coffin." The point? "To educate and entertain!" Steven wrote me. "Sitting idle while the world wallows in ignorance and apathy just isn’t for me."

In my letters to Steven, I didn’t talk much about my own life (though I answered his questions about the music scene in Chicago, where he’d once lived). It felt absurd to blather on about my bland day job, lunchtime trips to Noodles & Company, and watching television marathons on DVD. So I asked what life was like in Polunsky, what protest actions he had planned for the future, and whether he had any appeals left to fight his sentence. "One more," he wrote.

My string of questions began wearing itself ragged. I was repeating myself, struggling to avoid the one topic that burned at the forefront of my mind and the tip of my pen. Our letters grew further apart. I tried to send him copies of Punk Planet; they didn’t get through inspection. We "chatted" about protest behind bars. He wrote, "The biggest part of being an activist is reaching out and instilling the spirit of revolution and resistance in our fellows, to break the herd mentality...you place us into a situation where all the fuel is already there, and all it needs is a spark."

I wrote, "I am so impressed with all you are doing!" I thought: "What good will any of it do? You’re dying." We traversed light, safe, death-free discussion terrain: Chicago bookstores, my work at Punk Planet, the merits of Mountain Dew (which he loved and I hated). He wrote about the time of enlightenment that would come "after we win better conditions back here."

I avoided the mailbox, falling toward a selfish, gutless conclusion: I didn’t want to watch Steven die. I stopped writing first.

For four years, I quit thinking about Steven, or tried. But in the summer of 2012, I combed through my letters from pen pal interviews past. There was Steven. And so I took a deep breath and googled "Steven Woods" and "Texas death row." The Internet delivered the news: My friend had been executed in 2011. His last meal had included French toast, bacon topped pizza, chicken-fried steak, and, of course, Mountain Dew, though he hadn’t eaten a bite. His last words: "Warden, if you’re going to murder someone, go ahead and pull that trigger....I love you Mom....Goodbye, everyone. I love you."

　

In early 2013, Beth Derenne from the Women’s Prison Book Project sends me a packet of thank-you letters from women who’ve participated in her book exchange. I flip through the pages, pausing on a letter from Sable Sade Kolstee, who describes herself as a book lover with a "thirsty brain." I drop her a note to see if she’ll answer some questions for my book on prison and disconnection. She responds promptly in round, clear print: "I am 26 years old and a mother to 3 beautiful children. When you talk about disconnected—I was shut off from my children from April 4, 2010 until just this month, March 2013. My crime put restrictions on my contact with minors."

Sable writes achingly of how she’s been severed from her three young kids, all under the age of eight. Over the course of her incarceration, Sable has missed a long list of early milestones: "first steps, concerts, growth, birthdays, holidays, and many more." Letters, calls and visits from her children have been banned until recently, she writes: "My greatest challenge was fighting for the children. So many times counselors would say ‘I understand.’ I would look at them and tell them not to lie to me because none of you have ever gone 1 year, 18 months, 2 years without your children."

The battle for her children won’t end upon release, Sable says. The terms of her parole will also mandate a separation from her children. And, she writes, her "separation" extends beyond contact with her kids, and even beyond the limits of the law. She’s worried about how people will perceive her. "It’s not that I think I won’t be able to make a positive contribution to society when I get out," she writes, "but the stigma I will live with for the next 22 years will possibly make me shy or frightened of judgment. Although I want to help others and show my children that a mistake does not define you."

At this point, I’m absorbed and pained; I feel for my new pen pal. And I’m rooting for her! But the gigantic thought bubble hanging over my brain is shouting, "What was the mistake?" What act would bar her from receiving visits from her kids—or leave her with a twenty-two-year post-release "stigma"?

I google her, of course. One cruel irony prisoners face is that while they’re behind bars, unable to speak for themselves, the internet offers up a host of third-party information about them: mugshots, court documents, personal data (age, height, weight, tattoo verbiage), past records, and often-sensational press coverage of their convictions. A couple of newspaper snippets disclose that at twenty-three she was convicted of "statutory assault"—having a "sexual relationship" with a "known minor male" over the course of a couple of months, as evidenced by text messages exchanged between the two. I write Sable for her perspective on what happened.

　

Asking prisoners for their "side of the story" can be an awkward affair, something it doesn’t even make sense to do unless the incarcerated person initiates the conversation. After all, the story is just one of each prisoner’s stories—the act for which they’re incarcerated doesn’t define them—and the last thing a pen pal should be doing is implying that. Perhaps I shouldn’t have broached the topic in the first place. But Sable’s very straightforward: She "did it," she says.

In her early twenties, she was attending college and caring for her three young children, including a newborn. The kids’ father, Derrick, was in prison, and Sable, overwhelmed (she says she’d been "codependent" on Derrick), began to drink, use drugs heavily, and "sleep around with whoever." From there, she says, her judgment slid downhill. She began dating a guy who, a month and a half in, told her he was fifteen. They fought, he left—but he continued coming around at night for a couple of weeks, and Sable, drunk and lonely, suppressed her major qualms. "I thought, hell I did this at that age," she writes. The relationship soon ended, but Sable subsequently discussed it with a friend—who turned her in to the cops. She was charged with five counts of statutory sexual assault.

In the grand hierarchy of public perceptions of crime, ranging from I-don’t-know-why-this-person-is-in-prison to this-person-is-despicable-scum, people incarcerated for sex offenses are categorically deposited into the "scum" pile. I’d never corresponded with someone in this position before, except for brief interview-style exchanges for articles. Honestly, if I hadn’t impulsively written Sable based on her WPBP letter, I probably would’ve looked up her conviction and, glimpsing "sexual assault," ruled her out.

But I didn’t, and now we were friends, and—though I didn’t and still don’t pretend to fully comprehend the ins and outs of her case—when she wrote of her hunch that if she’d had money for a decent lawyer, she’d "never have seen a day in prison," I thought, "She’s probably right." I google "age of consent." In Spain, it’s thirteen. In Austria and Bulgaria, it’s fourteen. In Turkey, it’s eighteen. In Costa Rica, it’s fifteen. And in Pennsylvania, where Sable was convicted, it is sixteen; the boy with whom she had sex was fifteen years old.

I thought: "What good will any of it do? You’re dying."

I wonder: What defines a sex crime, what makes someone a sex "criminal," and why am I so hesitant about writing to someone who’s been branded with that label? I’ve had pen pals who have pled guilty to murder. Why am I even more insecure about corresponding with a woman who admits to a statutory sex offense? How do our definitions of "human" match up with our categories of "crime"? Questioning the labeling of a "sex criminal" is not to diminish the tragedy and trauma of rape, or the pain of survivors, who are often under-recognized, ignored, or even punished in our culture. Rather, it’s about questioning the logic of a system in which a person becomes defined by one of their acts—defined as that act instead of as a person. The questions knock at my brain. Sable and I continue to write.

One day, I’m delighted to find a letter from Sable in my box, this one sent from her grandmother’s house in New York, telling me she’s gotten out. "I did have pizza my first day out—it was SO good," she writes. She’s also enjoying the series of small decisions that comprise her days on the outside: picking out her clothes, cooking a meal, choosing to go for a barefoot walk along the nearby river...as long as she’s sure—as sure as one can be—that she will not come across a minor.

Indeed, there are many choices she can’t make. She can’t find a job, so is tethered to her "Gram" (who loves her but is prone to getting "worked up into a tizzy"). She still can’t see her kids. And her face is plastered on a sex offender registry for the next twenty-two years. Months later, I receive a short note from Sable: "Being on parole is the hardest thing ever." I wrack my brain for encouraging things to say—but "Hey, you’re getting out soon!" doesn’t work anymore. I end up simply writing, "I’m so sorry."

　

For deeper insight into the emotional and political roles of the pen pal, I turn to Rev. Jason Lydon of Boston. If there’s such thing as a prison pen pal guru, it’s Jason. His group Black and Pink focuses on helping prisoners connect directly with pen pals on the outside, building both friendships and action-based relationships that link people through the bars. Jason has been incarcerated himself, and many of his own pen pals are people he left behind in prison. He sees pen-palship as a way to "dispel myths about who’s incarcerated...it’s necessary for people to recognize that it’s human beings who are being locked up, denied access to health care, assaulted."

I’m struck by the way he talks about the pen-pal process as active and transformative: It’s not just about making friends. And, he tells me, if you’re fully engaged in the process, it’s probably not always going to be easy. You can’t keep your pen pal in a box. (That’s not what you’re there for—they’re in a box already.)

"We need to challenge ourselves on why we’re creating certain boundaries," Jason says, when I ask about navigating the sometimes-weird personal terrain of pen-palship. "Are we setting those boundaries to make ourselves feel comfortable, or to make ourselves feel safe? Allowing ourselves to feel uncomfortable can help us grow, and to build authentic relationships and understandings. Being uncomfortable at times is OK, as long as we’re still safe."

I think of my own abandoned pen pals. One expressed such blatant homophobia in a letter that I couldn’t bring myself to respond. I didn’t want to start a conflict but didn’t want to implicitly agree—so I stuffed his letter in a drawer. The other, of course, was Steven Woods; I had quit writing simply because I didn’t want to face the emotional avalanche of his impending execution, and I will always regret it.

Your pen pal may call you out on assumptions and biases you never realized you had.

According to Jason, the emotional avalanches are part of the point. In fact, he notes, the eruption of issues like misogyny, racism, homophobia, and transphobia may be a touchstone for important conversations, especially since, when we write to people in prison, we’re in a separate physical space. The medium of letters lends time to process words and contemplate responses. Jason tells me, "My hope is that people would be willing to extend a little more patience toward people on the inside than they would to folks on the outside, because of the amount of safety that we experience as folks who aren’t incarcerated."

He points to situations, for example, in which white prisoners have made racist statements in letters; pen pals have sometimes challenged those statements and engaged in productive dialogues (though Jason emphasizes that people of color shouldn’t feel any obligation to "be patient" in such situations, and if safety feels threatened, it is always OK to walk away). And it’s a two-way street: Your pen pal may call you out on assumptions and biases you never realized you had.

As a former prisoner, Jason knows the value of outside ties firsthand, especially for particularly marginalized groups of prisoners, who are regularly exposed to excruciating treatment. When he was locked up in a segregated unit for queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming prisoners and repeatedly subjected to cruel treatment and sexual violence at the hands of guards, he vowed to remain in touch with his fellow prisoners upon release. "For those of us who have been incarcerated," he says, the pen pal process serves as "a reminder to not forget folks who are left behind, that we have a responsibility to maintain relationships and compassion with those folks, to join in the healing process with them."

Concretely, Jason says, aside from expanding our boundaries and awareness and engaging in dialogue, there are a few immediate purposes for a pen pal. Receiving letters during mail call can serve as a function that resembles the other definition of "mail": a protective shield against potential violence. As noted earlier, it alerts guards that you’ve got contacts and advocates on the outside, so you’re less likely to be mistreated. Such "mail" is also useful when it comes to prisoners potentially harming themselves. Self-injurious behavior is common, and "having a reminder that you’re cared for and not forgotten—and part of a larger thing—can help you deal with the mental and emotional struggle that is the reality of being locked up."

　

In the book Howard’s End, E. M. Forster wrote his instructions on the best way to live in two short words: "Only connect." (E. M. Forster, incidentally, also announced on the BBC, in a fiery 1934 critique of the mechanization and industrialization of society, "Prison is no good.")

When we reach out to a prisoner to "only connect," we will always—to some extent—fail, because the barriers are so vast and so entrenched. But there are few cases in which a personal act that takes so little time can make such a great difference.

　

Before diving in, pen pals should check in with themselves, issuing a stern reminder that the act of writing a prisoner is not an act of charity. It’s about growing a unique breed of friendship. In fact, it’s one of the few contexts where you’re able to throw out a line to a stranger and say, "Will you be my friend?" It is an act that is not driving toward any clear, ostensible goal. Rather, it’s the goal-less endeavor of "getting to know" another person, which, for whatever reason, can be one of the most fulfilling, interesting, and transformative things to do in life. It’s also a primary building block for any greater political possibility that relies on connection between human beings—which, it seems, applies to every viable political possibility under the sun.

As the Illinois-based pen-pal collective Write to Win puts it: "We see individual correspondence with people on the inside as one piece of the larger struggle to abolish the prison-industrial complex and to create safe, sustainable, and equitable communities. To this end, we see our work as a way to undermine the isolation, dehumanization, and destruction of the PIC by building grassroots networks of support and solidarity between folks on the inside and folks on the outside."

In other words, how can policy change—or, for that matter, deep systemic change—evolve, if outside activists and theorists and advocates aren’t talking to the people they’re talking about?

Lacino Hamilton, an incarcerated activist in Michigan with whom I've corresponded for the past couple of years, emphasizes that it's crucial for outside audiences to listen when prisoners vocalize their struggles. "We cannot be passive recipients of the efforts of others," he writes. "We have to be part of the work being done."

The pen-pal journey is certainly not the endgame; it’s the beginning game. Perhaps, then, "Only connect" is not a perfect motto. Lacino’s words highlight the potential of prisoners’ connections with outside allies to build creative new models, initiatives, movements—maybe even revolutions—that cultivate a more just world.

Excerpted from Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn't Work and How We Can Do Better by Maya Schenwar, published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers.