I had a good conversation Saturday with a college student named Emily.

A rare pleasure for an old guy like me, most of my social life has spent with geriatrics

eager to talk about their most recent hip replacement, but Emily talked about her ambition

to go to law school and to devote herself to the issue of prison reform. A bright, articulate

idealist from a good family who entertains noble ambitions that nobody in my age group would

consider for two minutes. We're done with nobility. When we were her age, we sang that deep

in our hearts, we believed that we would overcome, but instead we got good jobs, hung out

with cool people, and we're overcome by piles of stuff we couldn't bear to part with,

and now we just hope not to fall down in the street and bang our noggin against a curb

and lie there gaga and be hauled away by EMTs who'll never realize what an illustrious

person we used to be, and not this jibbering mess on the gurney, and we're hoping to get

a decent obit, even though our illustriousness ended when most obit writers were in the

third grade. The surest way to get a great obit is to be in the arts and die before

it, and it's too late for that. Prison reform is a truly noble cause because there is

no political constituency demanding it. Every time I fly into LaGuardia, I look out at the

hell hall of Rikers Island, a prison right out of Dickens' England where men languish

who are unable to make bail, and life is brutal, and the democratic hacks of New York won't

touch this issue lest they be thought weak on crime. Emily knew all about this, and she

nodded. And if you take on prison reform, then you need to reform our broken mental health

system that was destroyed by my fellow liberals 40 years ago as de-institutionalization, the idea

that rather than enormous hellholes, you put the inmates in small hellholes where we wouldn't

be so aware of them. Emily knows about this too. And whatever progress you make will be painfully

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