What would it take to build a belonging-oriented criminal justice system? In this chapter, I explore this question with five system-impacted scholars with living or lived experience at a New York State facility. Together, we map pathways for the changes needed to create a penal system capable of reconciling the demands of individual justice and public safety with a more humane and dignified approach to those in conflict with the law. The chapter centers on three interrelated themes. Humanization calls for understanding human behavior, including criminal conduct, across a person’s lifespan, taking into account individual, social, and structural factors that shape developmental trajectories and support the capacity for change. Proximity entails dismantling structural, moral, and epistemic barriers to collaborative dialogue on justice matters. It seeks to create spaces where diverse voices converge to advance solutions to social harms that foster accountability, prevention, and reparation, while challenging prejudice and distrust. Epistemic empowerment involves incorporating the perspectives of (formerly) incarcerated individuals into theoretical and practical inquiries regarding offending, imprisonment, and legal system reform, recognizing the significance of their contributions to civic, legal, and political conversations about justice and change. The chapter operationalizes the epistemic recognition of lived experience in legal discourse on crime and punishment, advancing a vision of justice that embraces the transformative value of belonging.

Intersectionality is an analytical tool that both stands on its own, and is considered a key tenet of critical race theory. This chapter details how intersectionality can serve three roles in social work: it can serve as an important analytic tool for self-reflexivity, a prism through which policy and research can better understand oppression, and a technique through which social workers can develop critical race praxis. Emphasis is placed on the depth of intersectionality, for instance, it is not solely about identity but is about oppression based on complex social identities and positionality. Case examples and illustrations from social work situations are provided.

Ideas drive economic growth by freeing us from the curse of diminishing returns. That is true today and was true when economic growth began in northwestern Europe in the 1700s. Back then, ideas such as Arkwright’s factory revolutionized the cotton textile industry and drastically cut the cost of spinning cotton. A torrent of such new ideas, in fact, began began to flow through northwestern Europe from the 1600s on. Some came from scientific discoveries, although the wholesale application of scientific theories had to wait until the 1800s. Others reflected the new belief that innovation was possible and a new epistemological standard for determining what was true and worth investigating. The ideas could not be put to work, though, without the mechanics and engineers who had the skills needed to put the new concepts into practice. Northwestern Europe had such skilled workers, along with institutions that encouraged the search for new ideas. Did Europe’s religion also spur economic growth? Max Weber believed that Protestantism did, though recent research belies his claim. Christianity as whole, however, did foster economic growth in northwestern Europe in a variety of ways.

Inverse problems concern inferring unknown parameters and/or inputs of a system from partial observations. This chapter provides a high-level overview of the field, with an emphasis on how to pose inverse problems as an optimization problem. Most inverse problems are fundamentally ill-posed, and so they involve regularization, often in the form of physics and priors. Control theory and machine learning are both inverse problems. There are many other examples of inverse problems in the modern world. Two of the most compelling and relatable examples are in medical imaging and computational cosmology. In this chapter, we will cover these classical applications of inverse problems, including the Radon and Fourier transforms. We will also explore modern problems in image processing, PDE-constrained inverse problems, and system identification.

In their chapter, Eric Turkheimer and Jonathan Kaplan assert that Galton’s quincunx “unifies discrete and continuous, binary and normally distributed, random and deterministic, predetermined and epigenetic.” What starts as an anodyne recitation of antinomies, quickly raises questions about how they intend to use the quincunx model as they move from statistical couplets to the contrast of “predetermined and epigenetic.” In so doing, Turkheimer and Kaplan seem to reduce epigenetics, a diverse and complex set of biological processes, into a synecdoche standing in for all nongenetic factors (stochastic and environmental) in development (the pins of the quincunx). Epigenetics refers to a complex (and variably reversible) group of biological processes that regulate gene expression. Epigenetic mechanisms are involved in gametogenesis, the earliest stages of embryonic development, and throughout life. In early development, chromatin (complexes of DNA with histones and other proteins) packages DNA and forms the basis for epigenetic regulation mediated by chemical modifications of the chromatin. Early on, epigenetics establishes cell fate and cell identities; later in development and through postnatal life, epigenetic mechanisms transduce diverse physiological signals that may originate in the body or in the environment to reversibly regulate gene expression. Epigenetic regulation of gene expression represents one of many biological mechanisms (including such important processes as learning and memory) that utilize and build on genomic information to support an organism’s development, homeostasis, adaptation, and change. In so doing these processes, along with chance, increase the heterogeneity (“individuality”) of organisms and significantly degrade the possibility of making precise long-term predictions from DNA sequences. From genetics alone we cannot predict with certainty whether a person will suffer from a mental illness, finish graduate school, or get divorced. Even the effects of Mendelian alleles, such as the precise age at which a carrier will develop Huntington’s disease (Genetic Modifiers of Huntington’s Disease Consortium, 2015), are not deterministically predictable in the context of modifier genes, chance, and additional layers of regulation.

Current and speculative applications of quantum technologies are described (quantum adiabatic computing, quantum annealing, quantum reservoir computing, quantum metamaterials, quantum heat engineers).

A 71-year-old female with history of anemia and chronic gastritis after gastric bypass surgery 20 years prior, presents with 9 months of progressive lower extremity paresthesias, difficulty walking, and clumsiness. Over the past 1–2 months she has noticed lower extremity weakness, has begun falling, and the feeling of “numbness” has extended into her hands. She reports no relevant family history. She reports a limited diet due to her gastritis but denies recent weight loss.