Day 1-2
George Orwell’s six elementary rules of writing:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print;
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do;
3. If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out;
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active;
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent;
6. *Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Day 3-4
When the topic or the content is not so intriguing to you:
Justify your motivation: Keep telling yourself that you are reading something very helpful for your test/personal development/show off in a party.
Imaginary friend: Make up a friend that may have particular interest in the topic of the passage you are currently reading. Figure out how to recapitulate it to him/her.
When you find the main frame of a passage difficult to grasp:
You are paying too much attention in words/phrases/sentences themselves but not the wholistic idea.
reading the very first (sometimes second) sentence of each paragraph first.
For details/numbers/facts/events/descriptions, you can either skip them or fast-forwarding them.
Find transitional words.
When you still can’t understand a passage:
Value
Day 5-6
Jail break
Reforming prisons
America’s approach to incarcerationis an expensive failure. It does not have to be this way
incarcerate/ɪnˈkɑː.sər.eɪt/US/-ˈkɑːr.sə.reɪt/监禁
SHIRLEY SCHMITT is no one’s idea of a dangerous criminal. She lived quietly on a farm in Iowa,raising horses and a daughter, until her husband died in 2006.
Iowa艾奥瓦[原译：伊阿华]
Depressed and suffering from chronic pain, she started using methamphetamine.
methamphetamine去氧麻黄素
背景补充：n.an amphetamine derivative (trade name Methedrine) used in the form of a crystalline hydrochloride; used as a stimulant to the nervous system and as an appetite suppressant;
Unable to afford her habit, she and a group of friends started to make the drug, for their own personal use. She was arrested in 2012, underwent drug treatment, and has been sober ever since. She has never sold drugs for profit, but federal mandatory minimum rules, along with previous convictions for drug possession and livestock neglect, forced the judge to sentence her to ten years in prison.
conviction有罪判决；判罪
背景补充：Cruelty to animals, also called animal abuse or animal neglect, is both the unintentional (animal neglect) and the intentional infliction by humans of suffering or harm upon any non-human animal, regardless of whether the act is against the law.
Each year she serves will cost taxpayers roughly $30,000—enough to pay the fees for three struggling students at the University of Iowa. When she gets out she could be old enough to draw a pension.
Barack Obama tried to reduce the number of absurdly long prison sentences in America.
absurd/əbˈsɜːd; əbˋsəd/adj unreasonable; not sensible不合理的;荒谬的;荒唐的:What an absurd suggestion!多麽荒唐的建议! *It was absurd of you to suggest such a thing.你竟提出这种事,真荒唐.
His attorney-general, Eric Holder, told federal prosecutors to avoid seeking the maximum penalties for non-violent drug offenders.
offender An offender is a person who has committed a crime.
This reform caused a modest reduction in the number of federal prisoners (who are about 10% of the total). Donald Trump’sattorney-general, Jeff Sessions, has justtorn it up.
背景补充：attorney-general：司法部长
Most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general(sometimes abbreviated as AG) or attorney-general (pluralized as attorneys general or attorneys-general, as"general" is a post positive adjective) is the main legal advisor to the government, and in some jurisdictions they may also have executive responsibility for law enforcement, prosecutions or even responsibility for legal affairs generally.
tear up If something such as a road, railway, or area of land is torn up, it is completely removed or destroyed.
This month he ordered prosecutors to aim for the harshest punishments the law allows, calling his new crusade against drug dealers “moral and just”.It isneither.
crusade [kruːˈseɪd]~ (for/against sth);~ (to do sth)any struggle or campaign for sth believed to be good, oragainst sth believed to be bad（为争取好的或反对坏的事物的）斗争或运动:a crusade against corruption反腐化运动.
More is not always better
Prisons are an essential tool to keep society safe. A burglar who is locked up cannot break into your home.
burglar /ˈbɜːglə(r); ˋbəɡlɚ/n person who enters a building illegally, esp by force, in order to steal窃贼（尤指强行进入建筑物的）
A mugger may leave you alone if he thinks that robbing you means jail.
mugger
A mugger is a person who attacks someone violently in a street in order tosteal money from them.
Without the threat of a cell to keep them in check,the strong and selfish would prey on the weak, as they do in countries where the state is too feeble to run a proper justice system.
prey on 捕食,杀害;折磨,损害
But as with many good things,more is not always better. The first people any rational society locks up are the most dangerous criminals,such as murderers and rapists. The more people a country imprisons, the less dangerous each additional prisoner is likely to be. At some point, the costs of incarceration start to outweigh the benefits. Prisons are expensive—cells must be built, guards hired, prisoners fed. The inmate,while confined, is unlikely to work, support hisf amily or pay tax. Money spent on prisons cannot be spent on other things that might reduce crime more, such as hiring extra police or improving pre-school in rough neighbourhoods.
inmate/ˈɪnmeɪt; ˋɪnmet/noneof a number of people living together, esp in a hospital, prison or some otherinstitution同住在一起的人（尤指医院﹑监狱或其他机构中的）.
Confined：监禁 The wild animals are confined in small cages in the zoo. 野生动物关在动物园的小笼子里。
rough：A rough area, city, school,or other place is unpleasant and dangerous because there is a lot of violence or crime there.
And— crucially—locking up minor offenders can make them more dangerous, since they learn felonious habits from the hard cases they meet inside.
felonious adj.involving or being or having the natureof a crime
America passed the point of negative returns long ago.
背景补充：negative returns：The result of a business or company over a certain period of time having a financial loss or lower returns on a particular investment. This often occurs in a company's early years due to the company using their funds to get the business running.
Its incarceration rate rose fivefold between 1970 and 2008. Relative to its population, it now locks up seven times as many people as France, 11 times as many as the Netherlands and 15 times as many as Japan. It imprisons people for things that should not be crimes (drug possession, prostitution, unintentionally violating incomprehensible regulations) and imposes breath- takingly harsh penalties for minor offences Under“three strikes” rules, petty thieves have been jailed for life.
incomprehensible adj that cannot be understood; not comprehensible无法理解的;难於领悟的
breath-taking：令人心惊的
背景补充：“three strikes”：In the United States,habitual offender laws[1] (commonly referred to as three-strikes laws) were first implemented on March 7, 1994[2]and are part of the United States Justice Department's Anti- Violence Strategy.[3][4]These laws require a person guilty of violating both a severe violent felony and two other previous convictions to serve a mandatory life sentence in prison.[5][6]The purpose of the laws is to drastically increase the punishment ofthose convicted of more than two serious crimes. A ten-year sentence costs ten times as much as a one-year sentence, but is nowhere near ten times as effective a deterrent.
deterrent /dɪˈterənt; US -ˈtɜː-; dɪˋtərənt/n,adj(thing) that deters or is meant to deter起制止作用的（事物）;遏止的（因素）;威慑的（力量）:His punishment will be a deterrent to others.惩罚他以儆效尤.
Criminals do not think ten years into the future. If they did, they would take up some other line of work.
line of work n.the principal activity in your life that you do to earn money
One study found that each extra year in prison raises the risk of reoffending by six percentage points. Also, because mass incarceration breaks up families and renders many ex-convicts unemployable, it has raised the American poverty rate by an estimated 20%.
render：You can use render with an adjective that describes a particular state to say that someone or something is changed into that state.
Many states, including Mr Sessions’s home, Alabama, have decided that enough is enough. Between 2010 and 2015 America’s incarceration rate fell by 8%. Far from leading to a surgein crime, this was accompanied by a 15% drop.
surge：sudden occurrence or increase突然发生;激增
America is an outlier, but plenty of countries fail to use prison intelligently.
outlier n.门外汉
There is ample evidence of what works. Reserve prison for the worst offenders.Divert the less scary ones to drug treatment, community service and other penalties that do not mean severing ties with work, family and normality.
sever v.t.to separate (a part) from the whole, as by cutting or the like.
A good place to start would be with most of the 2.6m prisoners in the world—a quarter of the total—who are still awaiting trial. For a fraction of the costof locking them up, they could be fitted with GPS-enabled anklebraceletsthat monitor where they are and whether theyare takingdrugs.
bracelet[ˈbreɪslɪt]n.手镯；臂镯
Tagging can also be used as an alternative to locking up convicts—a“prison without walls”, to quote Mark Kleiman of New York University, who estimates that as many as half of America’s prisoners could usefully be released and tagged.
Tagging:vt., vi.加上标签；拴上铭牌 Tag the bottles now or we'll forget which is which. 把这些瓶子加上标签，否则的话，我们就忘了哪个是哪个了。
A study in Argentina finds that low-risk prisoners who are tagged instead of being incarcerated are less likely to reoffend, probably because they remain among normal folk instead of sitting idly in a cage with sociopaths.
sociopath a person who has a mental illness and who behaves in an aggressive or dangerous way towards other people
Justice systems could do far more to rehabilitate prisoners, too.
rehabilitate restore (sb) to a normal life by retraining, medical treatment, etc, esp after imprisonment or illness（通过重新培训﹑治疗等）使（某人）恢复正常生活（尤指出狱者或病愈者）:rehabilitate the mentally/physically disabled in the community使社区中智力[身体]有缺陷的人恢复正常的生活.
Cognitive behavioural therapy—counselling prisoners on how to avoid the places, people and situations that prompt them to commit crimes—can reduce recidivism by 10-30%, and is especially useful in dealing with young offenders.
Recidivis/rɪˈsɪd.ɪ.vɪst/a criminal who continues to commit crimes even after they have been punished
It is also cheap—a rounding error in the $80 billion a year that America spends on incarceration and probation. Yet,by one estimate,only 5% of American prisoners have access to it.
The road to rehabilitation
Ex-convicts who find a job and a place to stay are less likely to return to crime. In Norway prisoners can start their new jobs 18 months before they are released. In America there are 27,000 state licensing rules keeping felons out of jobs such as barber and roofer.
barber/ˈbɑːbə(r); ˋbɑrbɚ/n person whose trade is cutting men's hair and shaving them（给男子剪发和刮胡子的）理发师
roofer A roofer is a person whose job is to put roofs on buildings and to repair damaged roofs.
Norway has a lower recidivism rate than America, despite locking up only its worst criminals, who are more likely to reoffend. Some American states, meanwhile, do much better than others.Oregon, which insists that programmes to reform felons are measured for effectiveness, has a recidivism rate less than half as high as California’s.
Oregon[ˈɔrɪɡən]n.俄勒冈（美国）
Appeals to make prisons more humane often fall on deaf ears;voters detest criminals.But they detest crime more, so politicians should not be afraid to embrace proven ways to make prison less of a school of crime and more of a path back to productive citizenship.
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