Q&A with STEPHEN JANIS: "We rarely ask the right questions"

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Q&A with STEPHEN JANIS: "We rarely ask the right questions"

POSTED: Thursday, March 25, 2010, 6:00 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

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Thanks — at least in part — to The Wire, it's difficult to ignore the crime and corruption that runs rampant in Baltimore. Investigative journalist and novelist Stephen Janis uses his writing to discourage ignorance of the tragedies happening right now in that Maryland city, and across the country. His latest work of fiction, This Dream Called Death (BookSurge), is set in a Baltimore replica named the City of Balaise, where people's dreams are observed by a paranoid government. Naturally, Janis' Philly reading will be at Wooden Shoe. (Fri., 7 p.m., free, 704 South St., 215-413-0999, woodenshoebooks.com.)

City Paper: In the book, people's dreams are being monitored; when the dreams turn negative, the authorities take notice. Why did you choose for dreams — rather than actions — to be observed by the government?
Stephen Janis: The very aggressive zero-tolerance arrest policy implemented in Baltimore sort of provoked the idea of using the content of a dream as a means to punish, not so much as an instrument of mind control but as a metaphor for the city's penchant for detaining people for just about anything in order to deter crime. Taken to its logical conclusion, the idea of constant and unrelenting imperative to incarcerate can be just as psychologically stressful and intrusive as monitoring someone's dreams. Furthermore, I thought a metaphor would resonate better than simply writing about arrests.

CP: I see this getting comparisons to Big Brother in 1984 as a knee-jerk reaction, but how is this story different?
SJ: I think the social coercion is much less about technology in my book and more about a collective self-imposed restraint driven by a collective fear of crime. 1984, and the idea of Big Brother, is constructed around a technological omnipresence that is to a certain extent unseen. In my book, technology only comes into play in a very limited way at the end, and the whole Bureau of Dreams is dysfunctional and heavily politicized, which we learn about through the narration of an insider.

CP: As an investigative journalist you cover plenty of the crime, poverty and corruption that exists in Baltimore. How did this influence your story?
SJ: Quite a bit. The Baltimore Examiner had a very small staff, so I was able to cover City Hall, some crime, and do some pretty long-term investigations, all which sort of intersected for me and gave me a sense of a larger picture of how the criminal justice system functioned and how it could easily become a socially destructive force if unleashed without adequate oversight.

CP: Was the story's Deputy Mayor based on a real-life politician?
SJ: Not anyone specific, just trying to create a character who embodied both a restless ambition with an authoritarian streak.

CP: You've done readings in Baltimore for this book, but why come to Philly? How can we relate to this book?
SJ: We have the largest prison population in the world; however, we rarely ask the right questions about why. I don't mean to say that the subject is not hotly debated or discount the fact that many people are concerned about it. Still, I don't think we can ask the question enough — why, as opposed to many other countries, has the practice of incarceration become a blanket solution for a myriad of problems here? Do we recognize that, for example, in many cities when the economy collapses, the social infrastructure is replaced by prisons? I'm not saying I'm the first person to tackle this subject, but I have attempted to downshift the spectrum by telling the story under the auspices of a metaphor in part to make the question applicable to the universal human desire to be free and productive.

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