Turn the Titanic Around

The term “turn the Titanic around” is a curious one. After all, the original Titanic famously didn't get turned around in time.

The phrase implies, however, a sense not necessarily of impending fatality, but of hope. Thus the pop singer Amy Grant, imploring her lover to remember that “it takes a little time to turn the Titanic around.”

What’s true of an individual romance is also true of a major societal problem, Humans alone, among all the animals, have the capacity to imagine a different future. A future in which the Sword of Damocles does not fall, in which the Titanic does get turned around in time.

So it will be, I hope, with the problem of mass incarceration in America. The ridiculous, life-crushing extent of our prison predilection — and the need to reform it — is the constant theme of this blog.