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conulyCalifornia prison overhaul is filling county jails. This is probably counterproductive.
FRESNO, Calif. — Standing on the footsteps of the Fresno County Jail, where he had just been released one recent afternoon, Juan Diaz rated the food inside a 2. The state prison at Coalinga, where he served three years on a weapons conviction, earned a 10.
Battle-hardened young men like Mr. Diaz, 33 — who is a member of the Bulldogs, the largest Hispanic gang in California’s Central Valley, and who spent the night in jail for missing a court date on charges of possessing a stolen car and methamphetamine — used to deride the downtown Fresno jail as “Club Snoopy.”
Spending years in jail instead of prison is an increasing possibility now, as California carries out the most far-reaching overhaul of its criminal justice system in decades. And that idea fills Mr. Diaz with dread.
“I’d go insane,” he said. “I would probably hang myself, seriously. I would probably do something stupid.”
Built for stays shorter than one year, the jail does not offer the kind of activities, work programs and amenities found in most prisons. “You’re stuck in a little cell,” Mr. Diaz said, while prisons with outdoor space provide plenty of “yard time.” Soup costs $1 here, compared with 30 cents at the canteen at Coalinga, which Mr. Diaz said he left in 2005. “My homie just got out a couple of months ago,” he said, “and the canteen went up only, like, 3 cents, 4 cents.”
Ordered by the United States Supreme Court to reduce severe overcrowding in its prisons, California began redirecting low-level offenders to local jails last October in a shift called realignment. Its prison population, the nation’s largest, has since fallen by more than 16 percent to 120,000 from 144,000; it must be reduced to 110,000 by next June.
Counties with already tight budgets are scrambling to house the influx of newcomers in facilities that were never designed to accommodate inmates serving long sentences, like a man who began serving 15 years for fraud recently in the Fresno jail.
Fresno County — a sprawling agricultural area surrounding the city, which is also facing financial problems and became a punch line for Conan O’Brien recently — is adding 864 beds to its chronically overcrowded jail. Under a longstanding federal consent decree that requires the Sheriff’s Department to release inmates when the jail reaches capacity, 40 to 60 people are let go early every day.
In a move watched by other states also facing prison overcrowding, California is handing its 58 counties money and leeway to decide how to handle the new arrivals. Liberal communities like San Francisco are using a greater share of the state money on programs and alternatives to incarceration. But most counties, particularly here in the conservative Central Valley, have focused on building jail capacity.
That troubles organizations on both sides of the political spectrum. Sheriff Keith Royal of Nevada County, the president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association, said members were worried about their capacity to provide “adequate treatment” in jails and about “litigation at the location level.” The American Civil Liberties Union warned that instead of making fundamental improvements to the criminal justice system, many counties risked simply repeating the state’s mistakes by reflexively putting people behind bars.
Criticized for its overemphasis on jails, a local committee overseeing realignment in Fresno recently approved using $848,000 from its state total of $20.8 million this year to expand drug rehabilitation programs for people released from jail. But even that relatively small amount is facing deep skepticism from the county’s Board of Supervisors, which will vote on the plan in September.
“Some people, you’re not going to change their behavior until they’re incarcerated and they have to pay the consequences,” said Debbie Poochigian, the chairwoman of the Board of Supervisors. “I believe we’re keeping our community safer because they’re not out there looking for their next victim.”
The county has used about 40 percent of its state money so far to reopen two of three jail floors that were closed a few years ago because of budget cuts. The priority, Ms. Poochigian said, should be to finance the reopening of the third floor. If Fresno runs out of space, she added, inmates could be transferred to jails in other counties or to private jails.
According to the Board of State and Community Corrections, the population in county jails rose by about 4 percent from an average of 71,293 in last year’s third quarter to 73,957 in the first quarter of 2012, the latest figures available. In Fresno, like elsewhere, about two-thirds are inmates awaiting trial.
Allen Hopper, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. who co-wrote a study on the shift to jails, said the population at county jails could be significantly reduced by overhauling pretrial procedures. Many inmates, who present no risk, remain in jail simply because they cannot afford bail, he said, adding that alternatives like electronic monitoring and day reporting could free up jail space and save counties money.
But in counties where elected officials are afraid of appearing soft on crime, such alternatives are particularly sensitive.
“Everything is political,” said Sheriff Margaret Mims of Fresno County.
Sheriff Mims said she had become “less optimistic” about the shift to jails because of rising crime in the county, including burglaries and car thefts. Though law enforcement officials acknowledge that rising crime cannot be linked directly to the realignment policy, they say people engaging in nonviolent offenses like property crime no longer fear being sent to prison.
Despite Fresno County’s conservative attitude toward crime, the policy shift has fueled a debate about alternatives to incarceration by grouping various agencies in the committee overseeing the change, said Emma Hughes, a criminologist at California State University, Fresno, who is working as a consultant for the county.
Linda Penner, the chief probation officer and chairwoman of the realignment committee, said that having secured money to reopen two jail floors, the committee had the political room to approve the $848,000 for the rehabilitation program.
“Do I think we’re all getting on the same page in reckoning with the fact that we have to create alternatives to detention?” she said. “Yes.”
Inside the Fresno jail’s north wing, where the newly reopened facilities are, each floor is composed of six two-level “pods” housing 72 inmates. In one pod, men were lying on three-level bunk beds, watching television, playing cards or doing push-ups. They are given an hour a day at an indoor gym on each floor. Inmates in the jail’s older wings get only three hours a week, split between an indoor gym and a rooftop basketball court.
Violence among inmates has risen since the policy shift, Sgt. Terry Barnes said, attributing it to inmates’ realization that they might spend years in a place with few of the activities and amenities they enjoyed in prison.
“They’re very frustrated with the idea that this is it,” said Sergeant Barnes, a corrections officer who has worked at the jail for 24 years.
Outside the jail, David Otero, 35, was chaining his bicycle to a handrail before visiting his brother inside. Mr. Otero said he himself had spent seven months in the jail and 38 days at a state prison for a hit-and-run conviction in 2006. Prison had better amenities, he said, but there was “a lot more politics” there than in Club Snoopy.
His brother, who spent more than 10 years in prison on various drug convictions, was now serving his second year in jail for robbery, Mr. Otero said. He and his mother visit often, giving his brother money for the canteen.
“If he knows he’s a block away from his mom and his brother, who can visit him anytime, that’ll have a direct impact,” Mr. Otero said. “We’re just up the street.”
On the 1970s NYC subway map nobody liked
No sooner had the Metropolitan Transportation Authority introduced a new map of the New York subway system on Aug. 7, 1972, than complaints flooded in. Many stations seemed to be in the wrong places. The water surrounding the city was colored beige, not blue. As for Central Park, it appeared to be almost square, rather than an elongated rectangle, three times bigger than the map suggested, and was depicted in a dreary shade of gray.
The map was, indeed, riddled with anomalies, but that was the point. Its designer, Massimo Vignelli, had sacrificed geographical accuracy for clarity by reinterpreting New York’s tangled labyrinth of subway lines as a neat diagram. Each station was shown as a dot and linked to its neighbors by color-coded routes running at 45- or 90-degree angles. Mr. Vignelli had used his design skills to tidy up reality.
Design buffs have always loved his map for its rigor and ingenuity. When the future graphic designer Michael Bierut made his first trip to New York in 1976, he took one home to Ohio as a souvenir. But many New Yorkers were outraged by what they saw as the misrepresentation of their city, while tourists struggled to relate Mr. Vignelli’s design to what they found above ground. In 1979, the M.T.A. bowed to public pressure by replacing his diagrammatic map with a geographical one.
On the eve of its 40th anniversary, the story of the Vignelli map reads like a cautionary tale of a gifted designer expecting too much of the public or, as my grandmother used to say, being “too clever by half.” But its fate may have been different had the M.T.A. implemented Mr. Vignelli’s original scheme correctly.
Now 81, Mr. Vignelli moved to the United States in 1965 from his native Italy, and made an immediate impact in his new country. By 1972, he had established a New York design studio, Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Leila, and worked on the design of American Airlines’ corporate identity and signage systems for the Washington Metro and New York subway. An imposing personality with a highly disciplined approach to design, he so impressed the M.T.A. executives with his handling of the signage project that they invited him to redesign the subway map and rushed the result into production without submitting it to the usual rounds of consumer research.
But the M.T.A. only introduced one of four maps designed by Mr. Vignelli with the intention that, collectively, they would give passengers all the information they needed to navigate the subway. The diagrammatic System Map demonstrated how to get from A to B, but it was to be accompanied in each station by two Geographical Maps, one of the entire network and another of the local neighborhood, and a Verbal Map that explained in words how to go from place to place. Mr. Vignelli had never envisaged it being used without them.
Would his critics have felt differently had his System Map been reinforced by the other three? Perhaps, and even if they still disliked it, the others may have compensated for what they regarded as its shortcomings.
After all, there were other problems with the System Map. Mr. Vignelli had modeled it on the hugely popular 1933 diagrammatic map of the London Underground designed by Harry Beck, a freelance draughtsman who compiled it in his spare time. Beck’s “diagram,” as he called it, applied similar organizational principles, arguably with even greater rigor. Unlike him, Mr. Vignelli had included some geographical references, by identifying Central Park and areas like Manhattan and the Bronx. He has since regretted doing so, arguing that the map should have been wholly abstract, devoid of such distractions. But Beck’s design was gentler in style, particularly in its choice of typography, while Mr. Vignelli used the searingly modern font Helvetica.
The response to each map also reflected the architectural character of its city. London is such a huge, sprawling historical muddle that its citizens (like me) are generally relieved to see it simplified in Beck’s “diagram” and cheerfully forgive him for misrepresenting the wonky River Thames as being straight and Angel station as being level with Old Street, when it is further north. Whereas New Yorkers pride themselves on knowing their way around the orderly geometric grid of their streets, which explains why many of them felt they had nothing to gain from a shrunken Central Park and oddly located stations.
Here, the two maps illustrate the complexity of design’s relationship to the truth. In principle, we cannot be expected to trust anything that is not truthful, yet many of the greatest design feats have set out to deceive us, albeit for good reason. Just as the symbols and characters on your computer screen were designed to disguise the unfathomable mathematical coding of its programs, designers have devised maps to help us to make sense of befuddling terrain or transport networks. Londoners are willing to suspend disbelief when they see Beck’s “diagram,” because it is in their interest to accept its inaccuracies as expedient design ploys, while the New Yorkers who attacked Mr. Vignelli’s map felt deeply skeptical about it. Why would anyone want to redesign such an easily navigable city?
Mr. Vignelli has another theory. He believes that his System Map fell foul of what he calls the “verbal people,” whose ability to understand maps and other diagrams is less sophisticated than that of “visual people” like himself. “The verbal people, they can never read a map,” he said in the 2007 documentary “Helvetica.” “But the verbal people have one great advantage over the visual people, they can be heard.”
Even so, he had the last laugh. A year ago, the M.T.A. introduced “The Weekender,” an interactive version of the subway map on its Web site, and commissioned Mr. Vignelli to reinterpret his 1972 design for it. He did so on condition that it was described as a “diagram,” not a map, and the parks were erased, Central Park included.
Young North Korean defectors struggle in South Korea, well, duh.
SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Seong-cheol is a survivor. He left his home in North Korea at the age of 8 for a Dickensian existence, begging on the streets with a pack of boys when famine struck and his parents could not feed him. By his account, he endured several stays in brutal North Korean and Chinese prisons for attempting to cross the border into China.
But when he finally made it to South Korea, and freedom, Mr. Kim faced an obstacle that even his considerable street smarts could not help him overcome. He had placed into a university under a new affirmative action program, but was haunted by the deprivations of his past and quickly slipped behind South Korean classmates who had already made it through years of an extremely competitive education system.
“I just couldn’t shake the memory of hunger from my mind,” said Mr. Kim, 26, who dropped out after just one semester and fell into a deep, alcohol-fueled depression.
Mr. Kim is part of a growing number of defectors who are making their way south — the number has increased sevenfold to 23,000 in the last decade — and posing a growing challenge for South Korea. Attempts at integration, including government-run crash courses on life in the capitalist South, have had mixed results, leaving many North Koreans unable to adapt to South Korea’s high-pressure society or overcome their stereotype as backward country cousins.
The government had hoped that education might close the chasm, offering piecemeal steps over the last decade that evolved into a full-fledged affirmative action program, which gives young North Koreans the chance to bypass grueling entrance exams to enter top universities. Now, even that stopgap measure appears to be failing as large numbers of North Koreans are dropping out, creating new worries that they and other defectors could become part of a permanent underclass.
“These children are simply not equipped for South Korea’s fiercely competitive society,” said Shin Hyo-sook, a specialist in education at the North Korean Refugees Foundation, a newly created government research institute. “They suffer identity issues due to their extreme experiences.”
The difficulties have come despite the fact that the government and universities have tried to give them an additional leg up, offering the approximately 500 defectors enrolled in South Korean universities free tuition, government-paid housing and living stipends. And the problems are likely to get more pronounced as defectors increasingly include whole families and children who left without their parents.
Officials say the difficulties tend to appear at university because it is the first time that the defectors, who are sent to special remedial elementary and high schools after arriving, find themselves in the same classroom with South Korean students.
Many South Koreans had assumed that a shared language and culture would help defectors ease past the educational gaps, but the defectors say the extra help is not enough to catch up with South Korean classmates who spent the evenings and weekends of their childhood at cram schools preparing for entrance exams. Most of the North Koreans, often from that nation’s lower social rungs, have at most a few years of elementary school education more focused on political indoctrination than reading and math, defectors say.
An even bigger challenge, educators say, are the defectors’ emotional problems. While South Korean officials say they have not concluded whether these children suffer cognitive deficiencies from malnutrition, they say the North Koreans often suffer depression, anger and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
What is clear is the result: education experts say that at many universities, half or more of North Korean defectors are dropping out, though the problem is so new that complete statistics do not exist. (The dropout rate among South Koreans is just 4.5 percent.)
One North Korean who barely avoided that fate is Kim Kyeong-il, whose family reached the South in its second attempt to defect seven years ago. After the first attempt, when he was 9, he says, he was thrown into a North Korean prison where he barely survived the beatings and starvation that claimed the life of his father. After arriving in the South at 17 and going to a special remedial school, he got a chance to enter Korea University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools. But he found himself way behind in English, which he was not taught in virulently anti-Western North Korea. He was even behind in Korean, having reached only the fourth grade in the North. In lectures, he did not understand the professors’ jokes about South Korean pop culture, but laughed anyway to avoid sticking out.
“I felt like someone from the 1970s who was put on a time machine and dropped in the 21st century,” said Mr. Kim, 24, a senior majoring in Chinese language. He said many of his classmates shun him for his northern accent, and for his small stature likely caused by inadequate nutrition.
He avoided dropping out by transferring to Seoul’s Yonsei University, another high-level university but one that has been cited as a model for the support it offers defectors.
The university offers its approximately 50 North Korean students free tutoring and psychological counseling, according to Jeong Chong-hun, a professor who advises the North Koreans there. “They risked their lives to seek freedom here, so it’s our obligation to help,” he said.
Still, he said some students grow so isolated or bitter that they skip classes, and even there, a third of the defectors do not finish school. One North Korean student at Yonsei committed suicide.
Kim Seong-cheol, the former street beggar, said his own feelings of intense isolation contributed to his leaving school. His relatively coddled classmates, he said, could not possibly understand the traumas that he had suffered — the wrenching decision to leave his parents to survive or the pain of being shocked with electric prods in prison camps. And they were unburdened by the nightmares that jolted him awake at nights, leaving him too exhausted to study. In the worst dream, he relived the death of his best friend, over and over. The boy died in front of him, choking on a stolen ball of rice as an angry merchant kicked him.
But after a year of heavy drinking and never leaving his government-paid apartment during the day, Mr. Kim decided it was not in his nature to give up.
He enrolled at a new school, Konkuk University in Seoul, and changed his major from computer science to real estate, in part because it seemed easier.
“I must succeed this time,” said Mr. Kim, now a junior. “But whatever I do here, I still always ask myself, ‘What am I? Where do I belong?’ ”
FRESNO, Calif. — Standing on the footsteps of the Fresno County Jail, where he had just been released one recent afternoon, Juan Diaz rated the food inside a 2. The state prison at Coalinga, where he served three years on a weapons conviction, earned a 10.
Battle-hardened young men like Mr. Diaz, 33 — who is a member of the Bulldogs, the largest Hispanic gang in California’s Central Valley, and who spent the night in jail for missing a court date on charges of possessing a stolen car and methamphetamine — used to deride the downtown Fresno jail as “Club Snoopy.”
Spending years in jail instead of prison is an increasing possibility now, as California carries out the most far-reaching overhaul of its criminal justice system in decades. And that idea fills Mr. Diaz with dread.
“I’d go insane,” he said. “I would probably hang myself, seriously. I would probably do something stupid.”
Built for stays shorter than one year, the jail does not offer the kind of activities, work programs and amenities found in most prisons. “You’re stuck in a little cell,” Mr. Diaz said, while prisons with outdoor space provide plenty of “yard time.” Soup costs $1 here, compared with 30 cents at the canteen at Coalinga, which Mr. Diaz said he left in 2005. “My homie just got out a couple of months ago,” he said, “and the canteen went up only, like, 3 cents, 4 cents.”
Ordered by the United States Supreme Court to reduce severe overcrowding in its prisons, California began redirecting low-level offenders to local jails last October in a shift called realignment. Its prison population, the nation’s largest, has since fallen by more than 16 percent to 120,000 from 144,000; it must be reduced to 110,000 by next June.
Counties with already tight budgets are scrambling to house the influx of newcomers in facilities that were never designed to accommodate inmates serving long sentences, like a man who began serving 15 years for fraud recently in the Fresno jail.
Fresno County — a sprawling agricultural area surrounding the city, which is also facing financial problems and became a punch line for Conan O’Brien recently — is adding 864 beds to its chronically overcrowded jail. Under a longstanding federal consent decree that requires the Sheriff’s Department to release inmates when the jail reaches capacity, 40 to 60 people are let go early every day.
In a move watched by other states also facing prison overcrowding, California is handing its 58 counties money and leeway to decide how to handle the new arrivals. Liberal communities like San Francisco are using a greater share of the state money on programs and alternatives to incarceration. But most counties, particularly here in the conservative Central Valley, have focused on building jail capacity.
That troubles organizations on both sides of the political spectrum. Sheriff Keith Royal of Nevada County, the president of the California State Sheriffs’ Association, said members were worried about their capacity to provide “adequate treatment” in jails and about “litigation at the location level.” The American Civil Liberties Union warned that instead of making fundamental improvements to the criminal justice system, many counties risked simply repeating the state’s mistakes by reflexively putting people behind bars.
Criticized for its overemphasis on jails, a local committee overseeing realignment in Fresno recently approved using $848,000 from its state total of $20.8 million this year to expand drug rehabilitation programs for people released from jail. But even that relatively small amount is facing deep skepticism from the county’s Board of Supervisors, which will vote on the plan in September.
“Some people, you’re not going to change their behavior until they’re incarcerated and they have to pay the consequences,” said Debbie Poochigian, the chairwoman of the Board of Supervisors. “I believe we’re keeping our community safer because they’re not out there looking for their next victim.”
The county has used about 40 percent of its state money so far to reopen two of three jail floors that were closed a few years ago because of budget cuts. The priority, Ms. Poochigian said, should be to finance the reopening of the third floor. If Fresno runs out of space, she added, inmates could be transferred to jails in other counties or to private jails.
According to the Board of State and Community Corrections, the population in county jails rose by about 4 percent from an average of 71,293 in last year’s third quarter to 73,957 in the first quarter of 2012, the latest figures available. In Fresno, like elsewhere, about two-thirds are inmates awaiting trial.
Allen Hopper, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. who co-wrote a study on the shift to jails, said the population at county jails could be significantly reduced by overhauling pretrial procedures. Many inmates, who present no risk, remain in jail simply because they cannot afford bail, he said, adding that alternatives like electronic monitoring and day reporting could free up jail space and save counties money.
But in counties where elected officials are afraid of appearing soft on crime, such alternatives are particularly sensitive.
“Everything is political,” said Sheriff Margaret Mims of Fresno County.
Sheriff Mims said she had become “less optimistic” about the shift to jails because of rising crime in the county, including burglaries and car thefts. Though law enforcement officials acknowledge that rising crime cannot be linked directly to the realignment policy, they say people engaging in nonviolent offenses like property crime no longer fear being sent to prison.
Despite Fresno County’s conservative attitude toward crime, the policy shift has fueled a debate about alternatives to incarceration by grouping various agencies in the committee overseeing the change, said Emma Hughes, a criminologist at California State University, Fresno, who is working as a consultant for the county.
Linda Penner, the chief probation officer and chairwoman of the realignment committee, said that having secured money to reopen two jail floors, the committee had the political room to approve the $848,000 for the rehabilitation program.
“Do I think we’re all getting on the same page in reckoning with the fact that we have to create alternatives to detention?” she said. “Yes.”
Inside the Fresno jail’s north wing, where the newly reopened facilities are, each floor is composed of six two-level “pods” housing 72 inmates. In one pod, men were lying on three-level bunk beds, watching television, playing cards or doing push-ups. They are given an hour a day at an indoor gym on each floor. Inmates in the jail’s older wings get only three hours a week, split between an indoor gym and a rooftop basketball court.
Violence among inmates has risen since the policy shift, Sgt. Terry Barnes said, attributing it to inmates’ realization that they might spend years in a place with few of the activities and amenities they enjoyed in prison.
“They’re very frustrated with the idea that this is it,” said Sergeant Barnes, a corrections officer who has worked at the jail for 24 years.
Outside the jail, David Otero, 35, was chaining his bicycle to a handrail before visiting his brother inside. Mr. Otero said he himself had spent seven months in the jail and 38 days at a state prison for a hit-and-run conviction in 2006. Prison had better amenities, he said, but there was “a lot more politics” there than in Club Snoopy.
His brother, who spent more than 10 years in prison on various drug convictions, was now serving his second year in jail for robbery, Mr. Otero said. He and his mother visit often, giving his brother money for the canteen.
“If he knows he’s a block away from his mom and his brother, who can visit him anytime, that’ll have a direct impact,” Mr. Otero said. “We’re just up the street.”
On the 1970s NYC subway map nobody liked
No sooner had the Metropolitan Transportation Authority introduced a new map of the New York subway system on Aug. 7, 1972, than complaints flooded in. Many stations seemed to be in the wrong places. The water surrounding the city was colored beige, not blue. As for Central Park, it appeared to be almost square, rather than an elongated rectangle, three times bigger than the map suggested, and was depicted in a dreary shade of gray.
The map was, indeed, riddled with anomalies, but that was the point. Its designer, Massimo Vignelli, had sacrificed geographical accuracy for clarity by reinterpreting New York’s tangled labyrinth of subway lines as a neat diagram. Each station was shown as a dot and linked to its neighbors by color-coded routes running at 45- or 90-degree angles. Mr. Vignelli had used his design skills to tidy up reality.
Design buffs have always loved his map for its rigor and ingenuity. When the future graphic designer Michael Bierut made his first trip to New York in 1976, he took one home to Ohio as a souvenir. But many New Yorkers were outraged by what they saw as the misrepresentation of their city, while tourists struggled to relate Mr. Vignelli’s design to what they found above ground. In 1979, the M.T.A. bowed to public pressure by replacing his diagrammatic map with a geographical one.
On the eve of its 40th anniversary, the story of the Vignelli map reads like a cautionary tale of a gifted designer expecting too much of the public or, as my grandmother used to say, being “too clever by half.” But its fate may have been different had the M.T.A. implemented Mr. Vignelli’s original scheme correctly.
Now 81, Mr. Vignelli moved to the United States in 1965 from his native Italy, and made an immediate impact in his new country. By 1972, he had established a New York design studio, Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Leila, and worked on the design of American Airlines’ corporate identity and signage systems for the Washington Metro and New York subway. An imposing personality with a highly disciplined approach to design, he so impressed the M.T.A. executives with his handling of the signage project that they invited him to redesign the subway map and rushed the result into production without submitting it to the usual rounds of consumer research.
But the M.T.A. only introduced one of four maps designed by Mr. Vignelli with the intention that, collectively, they would give passengers all the information they needed to navigate the subway. The diagrammatic System Map demonstrated how to get from A to B, but it was to be accompanied in each station by two Geographical Maps, one of the entire network and another of the local neighborhood, and a Verbal Map that explained in words how to go from place to place. Mr. Vignelli had never envisaged it being used without them.
Would his critics have felt differently had his System Map been reinforced by the other three? Perhaps, and even if they still disliked it, the others may have compensated for what they regarded as its shortcomings.
After all, there were other problems with the System Map. Mr. Vignelli had modeled it on the hugely popular 1933 diagrammatic map of the London Underground designed by Harry Beck, a freelance draughtsman who compiled it in his spare time. Beck’s “diagram,” as he called it, applied similar organizational principles, arguably with even greater rigor. Unlike him, Mr. Vignelli had included some geographical references, by identifying Central Park and areas like Manhattan and the Bronx. He has since regretted doing so, arguing that the map should have been wholly abstract, devoid of such distractions. But Beck’s design was gentler in style, particularly in its choice of typography, while Mr. Vignelli used the searingly modern font Helvetica.
The response to each map also reflected the architectural character of its city. London is such a huge, sprawling historical muddle that its citizens (like me) are generally relieved to see it simplified in Beck’s “diagram” and cheerfully forgive him for misrepresenting the wonky River Thames as being straight and Angel station as being level with Old Street, when it is further north. Whereas New Yorkers pride themselves on knowing their way around the orderly geometric grid of their streets, which explains why many of them felt they had nothing to gain from a shrunken Central Park and oddly located stations.
Here, the two maps illustrate the complexity of design’s relationship to the truth. In principle, we cannot be expected to trust anything that is not truthful, yet many of the greatest design feats have set out to deceive us, albeit for good reason. Just as the symbols and characters on your computer screen were designed to disguise the unfathomable mathematical coding of its programs, designers have devised maps to help us to make sense of befuddling terrain or transport networks. Londoners are willing to suspend disbelief when they see Beck’s “diagram,” because it is in their interest to accept its inaccuracies as expedient design ploys, while the New Yorkers who attacked Mr. Vignelli’s map felt deeply skeptical about it. Why would anyone want to redesign such an easily navigable city?
Mr. Vignelli has another theory. He believes that his System Map fell foul of what he calls the “verbal people,” whose ability to understand maps and other diagrams is less sophisticated than that of “visual people” like himself. “The verbal people, they can never read a map,” he said in the 2007 documentary “Helvetica.” “But the verbal people have one great advantage over the visual people, they can be heard.”
Even so, he had the last laugh. A year ago, the M.T.A. introduced “The Weekender,” an interactive version of the subway map on its Web site, and commissioned Mr. Vignelli to reinterpret his 1972 design for it. He did so on condition that it was described as a “diagram,” not a map, and the parks were erased, Central Park included.
Young North Korean defectors struggle in South Korea, well, duh.
SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Seong-cheol is a survivor. He left his home in North Korea at the age of 8 for a Dickensian existence, begging on the streets with a pack of boys when famine struck and his parents could not feed him. By his account, he endured several stays in brutal North Korean and Chinese prisons for attempting to cross the border into China.
But when he finally made it to South Korea, and freedom, Mr. Kim faced an obstacle that even his considerable street smarts could not help him overcome. He had placed into a university under a new affirmative action program, but was haunted by the deprivations of his past and quickly slipped behind South Korean classmates who had already made it through years of an extremely competitive education system.
“I just couldn’t shake the memory of hunger from my mind,” said Mr. Kim, 26, who dropped out after just one semester and fell into a deep, alcohol-fueled depression.
Mr. Kim is part of a growing number of defectors who are making their way south — the number has increased sevenfold to 23,000 in the last decade — and posing a growing challenge for South Korea. Attempts at integration, including government-run crash courses on life in the capitalist South, have had mixed results, leaving many North Koreans unable to adapt to South Korea’s high-pressure society or overcome their stereotype as backward country cousins.
The government had hoped that education might close the chasm, offering piecemeal steps over the last decade that evolved into a full-fledged affirmative action program, which gives young North Koreans the chance to bypass grueling entrance exams to enter top universities. Now, even that stopgap measure appears to be failing as large numbers of North Koreans are dropping out, creating new worries that they and other defectors could become part of a permanent underclass.
“These children are simply not equipped for South Korea’s fiercely competitive society,” said Shin Hyo-sook, a specialist in education at the North Korean Refugees Foundation, a newly created government research institute. “They suffer identity issues due to their extreme experiences.”
The difficulties have come despite the fact that the government and universities have tried to give them an additional leg up, offering the approximately 500 defectors enrolled in South Korean universities free tuition, government-paid housing and living stipends. And the problems are likely to get more pronounced as defectors increasingly include whole families and children who left without their parents.
Officials say the difficulties tend to appear at university because it is the first time that the defectors, who are sent to special remedial elementary and high schools after arriving, find themselves in the same classroom with South Korean students.
Many South Koreans had assumed that a shared language and culture would help defectors ease past the educational gaps, but the defectors say the extra help is not enough to catch up with South Korean classmates who spent the evenings and weekends of their childhood at cram schools preparing for entrance exams. Most of the North Koreans, often from that nation’s lower social rungs, have at most a few years of elementary school education more focused on political indoctrination than reading and math, defectors say.
An even bigger challenge, educators say, are the defectors’ emotional problems. While South Korean officials say they have not concluded whether these children suffer cognitive deficiencies from malnutrition, they say the North Koreans often suffer depression, anger and other symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
What is clear is the result: education experts say that at many universities, half or more of North Korean defectors are dropping out, though the problem is so new that complete statistics do not exist. (The dropout rate among South Koreans is just 4.5 percent.)
One North Korean who barely avoided that fate is Kim Kyeong-il, whose family reached the South in its second attempt to defect seven years ago. After the first attempt, when he was 9, he says, he was thrown into a North Korean prison where he barely survived the beatings and starvation that claimed the life of his father. After arriving in the South at 17 and going to a special remedial school, he got a chance to enter Korea University, one of the country’s most prestigious schools. But he found himself way behind in English, which he was not taught in virulently anti-Western North Korea. He was even behind in Korean, having reached only the fourth grade in the North. In lectures, he did not understand the professors’ jokes about South Korean pop culture, but laughed anyway to avoid sticking out.
“I felt like someone from the 1970s who was put on a time machine and dropped in the 21st century,” said Mr. Kim, 24, a senior majoring in Chinese language. He said many of his classmates shun him for his northern accent, and for his small stature likely caused by inadequate nutrition.
He avoided dropping out by transferring to Seoul’s Yonsei University, another high-level university but one that has been cited as a model for the support it offers defectors.
The university offers its approximately 50 North Korean students free tutoring and psychological counseling, according to Jeong Chong-hun, a professor who advises the North Koreans there. “They risked their lives to seek freedom here, so it’s our obligation to help,” he said.
Still, he said some students grow so isolated or bitter that they skip classes, and even there, a third of the defectors do not finish school. One North Korean student at Yonsei committed suicide.
Kim Seong-cheol, the former street beggar, said his own feelings of intense isolation contributed to his leaving school. His relatively coddled classmates, he said, could not possibly understand the traumas that he had suffered — the wrenching decision to leave his parents to survive or the pain of being shocked with electric prods in prison camps. And they were unburdened by the nightmares that jolted him awake at nights, leaving him too exhausted to study. In the worst dream, he relived the death of his best friend, over and over. The boy died in front of him, choking on a stolen ball of rice as an angry merchant kicked him.
But after a year of heavy drinking and never leaving his government-paid apartment during the day, Mr. Kim decided it was not in his nature to give up.
He enrolled at a new school, Konkuk University in Seoul, and changed his major from computer science to real estate, in part because it seemed easier.
“I must succeed this time,” said Mr. Kim, now a junior. “But whatever I do here, I still always ask myself, ‘What am I? Where do I belong?’ ”
