Right next to Cow Palace in south central San Francisco, sit the city's largest housing projects. The crop of former Army barracks is now riddled with holes where bullets narrowly missed patio furniture and children's toys on residents' decks. Walk down the sidewalk, and you'll find shell casings, drink cans, and a dirty diaper.

For the last few months, no one has been sitting on their decks, a security guard told me, just as yesterday morning, when I went to the area to report on the burgeoning homicide rate, the streets were completely empty mid morning, the playground was deserted.

In addition to hanging out with a couple of police officers who let me ride along with them for a bit, I spoke with a number of people in the neighborhood that didn't make it into the story because they didn't want to be named in print and draw attention to themselves. Mostly, they weren't too surprised about the recent upswing in violence, as the place has been pretty nasty for years. One stifled tears as he recounted the recent shooting of a local man, and pointed out a woman who he said was the man's mother. The woman, malt-liquor in hand at 11 am, was not doing so well.

I sometimes have dreams about going to jail. They usually start with me walking to my car, finding a pile of parking tickets, and burning the lot of them in a burst of satisfying insanity. Next, I'm deciding whether it'd be more career damaging to not show up for work, or to use my one phone call to tell my boss I might be unstable. That's as close as I've gotten to being incarcerated, as the actual physical and psychological predicament of being locked up is more than even my nightmares can handle.

That said, I was at a conference the other day that addressed what incarcerated people deal with when having served their time, they reenter society--which the keynote speaker, Luis J. Rodriguez described as going "from hell on earth to earth"--and the fact that 7 out of 10 end up back in jail within 3 years. I'm not sure what being in jail does to a person, or what it's supposed to accomplish, but the speakers at the conference seemed to agree that providing certain services and opportunities to formerly incarcerated people might help them find a better alternative than returning to prison.

Welcome to paltaroni! New stuff is coming soon, but for now, check out some recent work:

Lipstick on a Pig, The American Prospect
Welcome to America, Tufts Magazine
Dumb and the City, San Francisco Weekly
White Collar Workers Unite!, Alternet
Half of a Yellow Sun: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mother Jones
Open for Business, San Francisco Weekly
Body Piercing Saved My Life, Mother Jones
Impeach (My) Bush: Peaches, Mother Jones
Time for a Change: Burt Bacharach, Mother Jones