For denizens of America's prison-industrial complex, Passover has a natural appeal.

After all, Pesach—as Passover is also called—celebrates liberation from captivity. The ritual meal's customs refer to the time when the Jews fled Egypt for Israel. That's why every holiday feast, or Seder, traditionally ends with: "Next year in Jerusalem!"

The message was always inspiring, but shouting out the phrase was bittersweet until the tenth and final Passover I spent behind bars. A visit to the Holy Land was unlikely for the New York State prisoners I shared the occasion with. For some, it was ruled out unless they defeated death. (Thanks to parole, I still can't go myself until 2019.)

But celebrating what was essentially a religious prison escape right under the cops' noses was always a thrill. As the story goes, the Egyptian Pharaoh kept vacillating about letting his slaves go. He wasn't sure even after the Angel of Death took the first-born sons from every home unmarked with a red smear of blood (warned by Moses, the Jews were passed over by the death-dealer—thus the name of the holiday).

The Pharaoh decided to let the Jews go after that atrocity, but they were still baking bread for the journey when word came that the mercurial tyrant had changed his mind again. The rushed tribe took its bread unleavened, which is why normal loaves aren't allowed during the holiday. Orthodox Jews keep a special set of flatware, never touched by chometz (leavened foods) for Pesach.

In prison, we made do with paper plates.

Unlike the Jews of yore, I was neither an innocent captive nor forced to labor. My Pharaoh was a monkey on my back, and most prisoners had one of their own. I didn't erect any monuments while a ward of New York's Department of Corrections, instead mostly working white-collar jobs in the 12 facilities I passed through. Four times, I served as a chaplain's Clerk. The pay was level four, as high as it gets at a quarter a day. The rabbis—employed by the state to minister to a questionable congregation of almost entirely "self-declared" Jews—took me on to manage their affairs. They ignored my obvious lack of orthodoxy, the paucity of faith I never tried to conceal, and my fondness for ham and swiss. I made up for those deficits with quick typing and other abilities.

For example, I could conduct a Seder.

Every Passover, Ethiopian Jews with felonies seemed to flood the New York prison system, discovering their true origins just in time for the annual gift boxes. By Ramadan, many of the same convicts were Muslim.

Last year, New York State had roughly 54,000 state prisoners, and before my release I was one of the approximately 1,500 who kept kosher. In private, the rabbis recognized only 10 percent or so of that number as real Jews. The rest were inmates seeking a kosher diet and rarely satisfying the Orthodox requirement of having a Jewish mother. The food wasn't worth it, but the cold cuts and cheese were sealed and therefore easy to sell. Since many of these faux Jews were African American, I heard lots of claims invoking Ethiopia, where a community of roughly 40,000 Jews maintained their religion despite being forgotten and isolated from the rest of the diaspora for millennia.

Every Passover, Ethiopian Jews with felonies seemed to flood the New York prison system, discovering their true origins just in time for the annual gift boxes. By Ramadan, many of the same convicts were Muslim. This meant paperwork for clerks like me—processing a bevy of applications for religion changes. (During my last year inside, Albany restricted changes of faith with a new policy. Now you can only change annually, and not at all if you're in the box—solitary confinement.) Bouncing between Jewish (for the Passover gift box) and Muslim (for the nighttime Ramadan food) particularly irritated our overlords. But complaining about it gave the state-employed imams and rabbis something in common as they carefully avoided talking about the Middle East.

Not one of the "Jewish" inmates ever convinced me that they had a legit Ethopian background, although I did meet gentiles with origins in that country. They made mistakes while inventing their backstories—an applicant insisted he was the product of a brief romance between an Ethiopian Jew and his Black Panther mother during her visit to Africa, fumbling which parent had to be Jewish. The rabbis were legally obliged to accept any prisoner who declared himself a member of the tribe, but you can't choose to be Chosen—the rabbis communicated to each other with little notations in Yiddish about who was "self-declared" and who was legit. Some of the fakery was fun, though—one guy was on his way to getting a kosher diet until he earnestly expressed a desire to celebrate Passover by "breaking bread with my Jewish brothers."

Preparations for Pesach went beyond cleaning: We used a blowtorch inside the oven to destroy any leavened particles. I went as far as to ritually "sell" my chometz to Rabbi Spritzer of Reaching Out. The Chabad organization takes care of incarcerated Jews; they never forgot to send me an authorization form for this allegorical sale. I only felt the gravity of the proscription when I witnessed the rabbi I worked for physically recoil from a salt shaker that may have been polluted by a crumb of something leavened. He wouldn't have jumped as far if there had been a knife in my hand; he cared more for his spiritual self than his corporal one.

My duties encompassed the distribution of the rare free lunch in a place where everything and everyone was for sale. Not a year passed that I wasn't rumored to skim off the top, and the amounts of canned gefilte fish I stacked in my cell after each Passover bolstered these accusations. In reality, I bought up enough to eat a can a week for a year, since the despised fish-in-jelly went for only a single stamp. That's 52 cans for about $20—a real bargain!

The few Ashkenazi Jews (our Israelis were all Sephardic) like me relished our gefilte fish, along with the packets of horseradish that came in the boxes. Everyone else hated the slimy dish, but no one wanted to waste the protein. Instead, they tried to modify it. The Hispanic population filled pastelitos with it. Having tried the fried patties filled with Central European–style ground whitefish, but still spiced the Caribbean way, I can say it wasn't altogether terrible. Less successful was another attempt to repurpose it: Some "Jews" deep-fried it, but the gefilte fish never held together.

Many of the men taking advantage of the rabbis' kindness and generosity to incarcerated Jews were anti-Semites.

Macaroons were the most prized of the Passover bounty, and there was fierce trade in them. The holiday boxes also included cans of tuna and cheap chocolates, as well as yarmulkes and a Haggadah (Seder guidelines—we received the pared-down ritual rather than the six-hour version).

Many of the men taking advantage of the rabbis' kindness and generosity to incarcerated Jews were anti-Semites. Without any real experience with Hebrews, they imagined us to be exotic creatures with horns and Rothschild money. Everyone "knew" that we ran the media and didn't go to work on 9/11, but the fact that Jesus Christ was a Jew shocked and insulted the white supremacists and Islamic radicals I spoke with. Their anti-Semitism was not informed, but rather inherited and mixed-up. The white supremacists knew they were supposed to hate Jews, but didn't know why. They applauded the Nazis for their ethnic cleansing, but denied the Holocaust ever happened.

I had few problems with these inmates as I was not considered to be Jewish—either because I wasn't Hasidic, or because I wasn't cheap, or because they didn't know what they were talking about. But it wasn't pretty. The boxes of matzah were universally called "Jew crackers," and during negotiations, accusations of "Jewing down" a price didn't raise an eyebrow. In my old life, I knew the best Jewish jokes, but I never told them inside, despite an eager audience. I didn't want to encourage an anti-Semitism that seemed almost instinctual—in some cases I was the first Jewish person these guys had ever met. And I'm not just talking about the inmates; the staff wasn't overly fond of Jews, either, despite the overtime they got on our holidays.

Since Seders must begin at sundown, they were never conducted by an actual rabbi. Orthodox Sabbath rules apply on holy days, and driving is a forbidden activity (the rationale being the prohibition on lighting fires—internal combustion engines have spark plugs). Rabbis would have had to sleep over in prison to perform the ritual. In later years I conducted Seders as a clerk, but my first four were spent in Greenhaven Correctional Facility, where we had a gabbai—a rabbi's stand-in, a position usually held by a young man aspiring to greater title.

The rituals he performed for us were correct to the last prayer, even though he had the finest pornographic library in the prison.

In the Orthodox program at Greenhaven, I watched a murderer and Hasidic Jew named Phil rule over the ritual table for four Seders.

Phil was serving 50 to life, sentenced to 25 years for each life he was found guilty of ending with a gunshot in 1980. He read Hebrew melodically and knew all the rituals from a Brooklyn childhood spent in yeshivas. The rabbi loved having someone so well versed to serve as his replacement; Phil had been doing it for decades. The rituals he performed for us were correct to the last prayer, even though he had the finest pornographic library in the prison. (Phil kept the entire run of Buttman in his cell, thanks to an expensive subscription. Our rabbi knew this, but who else could he chat with in Yiddish?)

I paid careful attention and kept my atheism private.

Phil discouraged gentiles from attending by making sure the food was not released until the prescribed time in the ceremony. We could only eat after the traditional four questions had been asked and every other Pesach custom done. We sang the songs and hid the matzah—something the guards keeping watch always found suspicious.

After four years there, I spent my remaining six incarcerated Passovers in other prisons, leading services in several of them. In time, I developed my own technique; instead of forcing the unwilling to sit through a ritual they cared nothing for, I always offered the men an option of eating immediately and leaving. That usually left a kernel of three or four Jews and wannabes going through the Haggadah with me.

Some prisons had more Jews than others, but at one Seder I ran, there were enough participants for a minyan, or the ten adults needed for certain prayers. (A Torah can stand in for one—even if a woman cannot.) All of the men were African American, and none were from Ethiopia. I figured it was going to be a short night, and offered my usual eat first and pray later deal. To my astonishment, everyone wanted to stay—they had heard I was a good storyteller. And so I went through with our Seder.

I'll never forget the asking of the four questions that Passover. The youngest person at the table has to do it, and slowly reading out the words with care and effort, a kid I knew to rank high as a Blood pronounced most of them correctly.

I was methodically queried by the 19-year-old GED student named Romance Jones. He wanted to know the answers, never having heard them before.

I swallowed my Jew cracker in silent admiration.

Follow Daniel Genis on Twitter.

Recreational marijuana is now legal in four states, allowed for medical purposes in 23, and decriminalized in 15. A majority of Americans support legalization, according to the nation's most authoritative public opinion poll. In Colorado, legal weed is now a $700 million industry, and the state has more tax revenue from pot sales than it knows what to do with. Nationally, the market for legal cannabis jumped to $2.7 billion last year, and analysts project it could quadruple by 2019 if legalization trends continue.

But despite the recent success of the legalization movement, the federal government has yet to get on board. One looming issue, in particular, is holding the marijuana market back, which is its status as a Schedule I drug, a classification that puts weed in the same category as heroin and other narcotics that have no recognized medical value.

The federal scheduling has been a singular source of frustration among marijuana activists for decades. It has held back research into the medical benefits of cannabis, stymied innovation and investment, and cut off the burgeoning industry's access to banking institutions. And despite the assurances of the Obama administration, it has kept medical marijuana dispensaries, cultivators, and patients in constant fear of being raided and locked up in federal penitentiary.

As the disparity between state and federal law grows—and as a growing number of senior Obama administration officials publicly contradict the federal line—marijuana advocates are agitating to break down what they see as the biggest federal hurdle to the legalization movement. Recent statements by President Obama, as well as a spate of new bipartisan marijuana bills introduced in Congress, have raised their hopes, suggesting that the feds may be open to downgrading marijuana's schedule classification in the near future.

In an interview with VICE last month, Obama noted the growing bipartisan support for decriminalizing pot. "You're starting to see not just liberal Democrats, but also some very conservative Republicans recognize [prohibition] doesn't make sense, including sort of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party," he said.

"They see the money and how costly it is to incarcerate," he added. "So, we may actually be able to make some progress on the decriminalization side. At a certain point, if enough states end up decriminalizing, then Congress may then reschedule marijuana."

In this and other statements, Obama suggests that it's up to Congress to change marijuana's classification under the Controlled Substances Act. But while the executive branch has the authority to change scheduling without congressional action, the White House has so far avoided talk of a unilateral action to reschedule the drug. The lack of action frustrates legalization advocates, who note that Obama hasn't been shy about bypassing Congress on other issues, including like immigration and gun control.

"Comments by the surgeon general and the president himself seriously call into question the appropriateness of keeping marijuana in Schedule I, a category that's supposed to be reserved for substances with a high potential for abuse and no medical use," said Tom Angell, founder of Marijuana Majority. "There's absolutely no reason that this president—who has often gone out of his way to take action when Congress won't—shouldn't use his legitimate powers to reschedule marijuana. Voters overwhelmingly support marijuana reform, and making moves to line up federal policy with his own stated views about the drug could be an important part of Obama's legacy."

Responding to my request for comment, the White House did not directly address the question of rescheduling. In a statement, Samuel Schumach, press secretary for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, pointed out that under Obama, the DEA has increased the amount of marijuana made available for research. "While marijuana remains a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act," he said, "this Administration has actively increased support for research into what components of the marijuana plant could be used as medicine."

"To date, however, neither the FDA nor the Institute of Medicine have found smoked marijuana to meet the modern standard for safe or effective medicine," Schumach continued. "The Administration's position on enforcement has been clear and consistent: while the prosecution of drug traffickers remains an important priority, targeting individual marijuana users—especially those with serious illnesses and their caregivers—is not the best allocation of limited Federal law enforcement resources."

It is true that, behind the scenes, in the Obama administration has quietly eased up on the federal government's position on marijuana research. On Thursday, the National Institute on Drug Abuse—which controls the sole supply of legal marijuana for research in the US— gave the green light to a long-delayed study exploring the possible benefits of marijuana as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. The study is notable because it will be the first in the US to use whole-plant marijuana, rather than extracted THC.

In June, the FDA announced it was beginning a mandatory review of marijuana's safety and effectiveness—and the agency could that marijuana be dropped from the list of Schedule I drugs. In a statement sent to VICE Thursday, an FDA spokesman said the review "is still ongoing and there is no timeline established for its completion."

While the administration tiptoes toward liberalizing federal drug laws, a group of Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans in Congress have taken up Obama's challenge. In March, Democratic Senators Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand teamed up with Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky to introduce the Compassionate Access, Research Expansion and Respect States (CARERS) Act.

It's the first ever Senate bill that would let states to set their own policy on medical marijuana. It would also drop the drug from Schedule I to Schedule II, and allow doctors to prescribe cannabis to military veterans for PTSD.

Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer of California and GOP Nevada Dean Heller signed on as co-sponsors to the Senate bill last month, and California Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein said she is reviewing the legislation. The House version of the bill, introduced by Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen and Arkansas Republican Don Young, gained seven new bipartisan co-sponsors this week. The bill's authors expect several more GOP members to sign on when Congress returns from the Easter recess, according to a source familiar with the discussions.

"We need policies that empower states to legalize medical marijuana if they so choose—recognizing that there are Americans who can realize real medical benefits if this treatment option is brought out of the shadows," Booker said in a statement this week. "The growing momentum and bipartisan support for the CARERS Act in both the Senate and House are a clear indication that together, we can and will make medical marijuana accessible to the millions of Americans who could benefit from it."

The bill has attracted significant interest from parents with children suffering from various epilepsy conditions, since cannabinoid oils have shown potential to be an effective anti-seizure medication. A Change.org petition in support of the CARERS Act started by one such mother currently has more than 124,000 supporters.

Both bills face an uphill battle in Congress. In the Senate, the first big hurdle is getting the bill past Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, who controls which legislation makes it onto the committee's schedule and who has typically been skeptical of efforts to liberalize drug policy. At a town hall in Iowa Monday, Grassley said that he would have to read the bill before deciding whether to allow it to move forward.

The legislation may have a better chance in the House, where members have shown more interest in loosening drug laws and enforcement policy. Last year, 49 House Republicans joined Democrats to pass an amendment halting DEA raids on medical marijuana operations. On the other hand, five of the "no" votes on that amendment came from the GOP leadership, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte.

So while there are several possible avenues for dropping marijuana from Schedule I, each has a relatively small window for success. There's also the unfortunate reality of Washington politics, which dictates that any broad, bipartisan legislation like the CARERS Act will have to be passed in 2015, before Congress gets swept up in election fever. And any action taken by the Obama administration could be undone by his successor.

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It's time, once again, to marvel at some idiots who don't know how to handle the world:

Cry-Baby #1: The Texas Department of Public Safety and Transportation

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Photo via Snoop Dogg's Instagram

The incident: A state trooper posed for a photo with Snoop Dogg.

The appropriate response: Nothing.

The actual response: He was ordered to undergo counseling.

Two weeks ago, while at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas State Trooper Sergeant Billy L. Spears posed for a photo with Snoop Dogg.

Snoop posted the photo on his Instagram page with the caption "Me n my deputy dogg." The caption was followed by an emoji of a gun and two of stars.

Some time after this, a supervisor from the Texas Department of Public Safety and Transportation drove 40 miles to hand-deliver a counseling order to Billy.

Billy's lawyer, Ty Clevenger, posted the order online on Wednesday. "While working a secondary employment job, Trooper Spears took a photo with a public figure who has a well-known criminal background including numerous drug charges," it reads. "It reflects poorly on the agency."

The lawyer claims that his client didn't know about Snoop's criminal background. "Believe it or not, some folks don't watch TMZ or read People Magazine," he wrote.

Ty also claims that the real reason the citation was given was as an "act of retaliation against Billy" because he "reported misconduct by an officer from another agency last year."

Billy is reportedly not able to appeal the citation as it is technically not a formal disciplinary action. However, according to Ty, the counseling will still go on Billy's personnel record, and could harm his eligibility for future promotions.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety and Transportation refused to comment on the case, saying that the agency does not comment on personnel issues unless they result in disciplinary action.

Cry-Baby #2: An unnamed Wawa customer and Wawa

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Screencaps via Google Maps and Asbury Park Press

The incident: A gas station attendant used a toy of a boy peeing to clean a woman's side mirror.

The appropriate response: Tittering.

The appropriate response: The passenger in the car reportedly complained that she was being sexually harassed, and the attendant was fired.

Until last Wednesday, 57-year-old Mike Cuzzo of Brick, New Jersey, was an extremely popular attendant at a local Wawa gas station.

His popularity seems to stem from the fact that he was a lovable Michael Scott–type figure while at work. According to a report on APP, he would wear a clown nose or a tuxedo (as pictured above) to work some days. Another time, he dyed his hair and beard pink for breast cancer awareness.

"The world would be a better place if everybody got to meet this man," said one customer.

This changed last week, after an incident in which Mike used a plastic toy of a peeing boy (pictured above) to clean the side mirrors of a woman's car. This was apparently something he did regularly.

According to a post on Patch, the driver of the car laughed as he did this. "But then the passenger, who I hadn't seen at first, leaned over and said, 'That's sexual harassment,'" said Mike.

Mike claims he was brought into an office to speak to two managers later that day. The managers, he says, fired him on the spot.

He also reportedly lost 18,000 Goosebumps points he'd accumulated, too. I don't really know what that means, but it definitely doesn't sound good.

On Sunday, a crowd of Mike's supporters gathered outside the Wawa to protest Mike's firing. "People who treat customers the way he does and did don't deserve what happened to him," said one.

Another said that he planned to boycott Wawa over their decision to fire Mike: "No more Wawa coffee, no more Wawa gas, no more Wawa cigarettes, no more Wawa."

In a statement, a representative for Wawa denied that Mike was let go just because of the peeing toy incident. "We would never make a decision about any associate based on a single isolated incident like this," the statement reads. "Decisions like these are extremely difficult and are only made after a series of steps and discussions take place."

On Wednesday, USA Today reported that Mike had been approached about a job with a nearby auto company.

Who here is the bigger cry-baby? Let us know in this poll down here, please:

Previously: A woman fired a gun into a McDonald's because they forgot to put bacon on her cheeseburger and a 12-year-old allegedly tried to poison her mom for confiscating her iPhone.

Winner: The alleged iPhone poisoner!!!

Follow Jamie Lee Curtis Taete on Twitter.

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Photo via Flickr user Bob B. Brown

This story was co-published with The Marshall Project.

Shawanna Vaughn thought she had landed her dream job in November, joining New York Mayor Bill de Blasio's $12.7 million plan to curtail the bloodshed produced by the city's deadly mix of street beefs and guns.

The 36-year-old mother of two went to work as a violence interrupter for Harlem SNUG (that's guns spelled backwards), part of a nationwide program called Cure Violence that treats urban crime as a contagious disease. Vaughn earned a $32,000 salary interviewing victims of stabbings and shootings as they recovered in Harlem Hospital. She would offer to help mediate between victims and attackers, to defuse tensions. She always promised to keep their stories secret from the police.

Now Vaughn has become, depending on who is telling the story, a whistleblower or a snitch. In late February, Vaughn told a program director with the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice that Harlem SNUG employs active members of the Bloods gang and a subsidiary group called Shine Love, a street crew based out of a nearby public housing development. In an interview with The Marshall Project, Vaughn said neighborhood drug dealers used the SNUG office bathroom to deal narcotics. On one occasion, she said, a former SNUG employee showed up at the office with three armed men who pulled out their guns on a co-worker. On March 12, she was fired, and took her story to the New York Police Department.

"People's public safety is at risk," Vaughn said. "You have to tell the truth."

Cure Violence declined to respond to questions about Vaughn's charges or to say why she was fired. The Manhattan District Attorney's office has a prosecutor looking into her allegations. Sarah Solon, a spokeswoman for Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, confirmed city officials are also investigating.

"The City takes these allegations seriously," Solon wrote in a statement. "We do not want to lose sight of the important role that credible messengers and targeted programming can play in preventing violence; however, it must be done in a manner that promotes safety."

Safety has been a recurring issue for Harlem SNUG's parent organization, Cure Violence, which uses former gang members to mediate simmering street conflicts between warring teenagers and young adults who are beyond the influence of local police.

Cure Violence was started under the rubric CeaseFire in Chicago in 1995 by Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who theorized that gang violence could be treated like an epidemic. (Slutkin had worked with the World Health Organization combating AIDS in Uganda.) Unlike an anti-gang model popularized in Boston during the late 1990s, in which ex-offenders and police officers worked together to curtail violence, Slutkin's approach leans more heavily on members of the street culture.

"We hire the people who already know everybody around from the same neighborhoods, and they're very much trusted," Slutkin said in a recent NPR interview. "There's a way to reverse epidemics. And in order to interrupt the transmission, you need to detect and find first cases."

Cure Violence, based out of the University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Public Health, employs an estimated 350 outreach workers in 23 cities across the country and has a reputation as an effective anti-violence program. It has received more than $14 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and a version of the program launched in Baltimore, called Safe Streets, has won multiple grants from the US Department of Justice. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for The Prevention of Youth Violence reported in a January 2012 study that the Baltimore program had mediated 276 disputes and prevented at least five homicides and 35 nonfatal shootings within a three year span. The program was the subject of an acclaimed documentary, The Interrupters, that followed CeaseFire street workers around tough Chicago neighborhoods over the course of a year.

But the Baltimore Health Department closed the Safe Streets office in December 2013 after police arrested an outreach worker for carrying a handgun. That announcement came a few weeks after the US Marshals arrested one of the program's most famous employees, Nathan "Bodie" Barksdale, who was an inspiration for the drug lord character Avon Barksdale on the HBO series The Wire. The Drug Enforcement Agency accused Barksdale of being a heroin dealer for the Black Guerilla Mafia.

Chicago cut funding for the program in that city (still called CeaseFire) after police grew suspicious that employees, many of whom were former felons, had returned to a criminal lifestyle, and after Tio Hardiman, the organization's Illinois director, was arrested for punching his wife. Hardiman sounds disenchanted with the organization's approach.

"You have to have a mix. You can't just have former gang members working. You gotta have people who haven't broken the law," Hardiman told The Marshall Project.

Cure Violence spokeswoman Kathy Buettner declined to comment on the problems in specific cities and defended the program's continued mission of sending ex-offenders into rough neighborhoods to stem shootings.

"We are training and retraining all the time," Buettner said.

The issues in Chicago and in Baltimore didn't impede officials in New York from expanding Cure Violence across the state under Operation SNUG. The state Division of Criminal Justice Services oversees ten SNUG offices and the city Department of Health and City Council funds sites in 14 police precincts.

Jeffrey Butts, a director of research at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, co-wrote an ongoing analysis of Cure Violence's presence in high-crime New York City neighborhoods and found that homicide rates are on a downward trend in three areas that employed the interrupters in Brooklyn and in northern Manhattan.

"They can form relationships in high-violence communities that police, social workers and ministers simply can't," Butts said.

Vaughn, whose allegations have cast a shadow over the New York program, understands both sides of the law. The daughter of a 20-year veteran of the Bakersfield Police Department, she said she served four years in a California prison for robbing a Bank of America branch. Her brother was murdered in Bakersfield when he was 24.

The NYPD has since moved Vaughn and her two children out of her old apartment and into a safe house while police continue to investigate whether her former co-workers have connections to the Bloods. She is angry that her complaints were initially ignored, and fearful for her family's safety.

This story was reported by Simone Weichselbaum for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization focused on the US criminal justice system. You can sign-up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

For more than two decades now, Tsai Ming-liang has been a luminary of world cinema. Few other filmmakers of his generation can lay claim to as many plaudits on the festival circuit and appearances on top-ten lists as the Taiwanese auteur. But until now, virtually no American viewers have had a chance to see his 1992 debut, Rebels of the Neon God. Finally receiving a proper theatrical release in the US 23 years after it was made, it's an expectedly fitting introduction to Tsai's singular style and a haunting work.

Tsai is nearly as fond of rain as Akira Kurosawa was, so much of Rebels takes place during or after a downpour. Apartments are flooded, the street is always wet, but no one ever makes much mention of it—this is the norm. He emphasizes the most cramped, claustrophobic elements of Taipei. Whether riding through the damp streets or losing a game of Street Fighter at the arcade, Tsai's adolescent protagonists feel at once detached from, and bound to, the dense urban environment. The more they try to mentally escape it via video games or petty thievery, the more it closes in on them. Early on we see young Hsiao-kang walk into an overcrowded classroom where he's studying for entrance exams, lost among a throng of other aspiring students. Here and elsewhere, he's all but faceless.

Though his family is Chinese and he was born in Malaysia, Tsai has come to be regarded as a quintessential Taiwanese filmmaker through such works as Vive L'Amour, What Time Is It There?, and last year's Stray Dogs. He came of age as Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien were putting their country on the cinematic map, a tradition he's carried on proudly.

Rebels is hardly Tsai's only film about people feeling lost and lonely in Taipei, but he is able to explore the same idea in several different ways without it feeling as though he's repeating himself. It also isn't the only one starring frequent collaborator Lee Kang-sheng, who plays Hsiao-kang here. It's easy to see why. Lee is able to maximize his relatively few lines of dialogue, emoting so much as he navigates the streets of his city and looks for something fulfilling (or at least distracting) to occupy his time. Eventually he notices Ah-tze, who along with a friend is often getting into trouble.

For a while, these two threads are mostly separate from one another. Hsiao-kang and Ah-tze will pass by each other on the street—Ah-tze on his scooter, Hsiao-kang in the passenger seat of his father's car. And though one vehicle ends up with a broken side-view mirror, there's no meaningful interaction between the two. Tsai's characters are at their loneliest when they're in closest physical proximity to the people they're distant from emotionally.

On the wall of an arcade where the two youths spend much of their time hangs a huge poster of James Dean, a towering symbol of cool and a reminder of how much more exciting life is on the big screen. At one point early on, Hsiao-kang's father speaks excitedly of his plans to go to the movies as a family—something they haven't done in years. Their minor car accident puts those plans to rest and sours his mood. There'll be no escaping the mundane by watching the glamorous lives of others—Hsiao-kang will have to find another way to pass the time.

As if to balk at the notion of cinematic escapism, Rebels of the Neon God is a haltingly naturalistic portrayal of urban isolation. Any viewers who already feel as detached as Hsaio-kang won't find the refuge they might in Rebel Without a Cause, though Tsai's take on adolescent confusion is no less convincing. The bright, flashing lights of the arcade couldn't match the characters' inner lives any less.

The title is a reference to Nezha, the mischievous neon god whom Hsiao-kang's mother believes he is a reincarnation of. He jumps and dances around their small apartment as though he were possessed, scaring his mother and confusing his father. As if to further live up to that dubious distinction, he drops out of cram school without telling his parents and keeps the refund money for himself, spiraling even further away from where he should be and toward a collision with Ah-tze.

Though this may sound quite dour, there's a humor to Tsai's sensibility that cuts through the taedium vitae. There's also a hauntingly catchy score with a repetitive bass line that gets stuck in your head and comes to define the overall feeling of Rebels of the Neon God: rhythmic and dark, but never quite despairing.

Follow Michael on Twitter.

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San Francisco Hall of Justice, which includes the county jail. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

On at least two occasions in March, Sheriff's Deputy Scott Neu allegedly used threats of violence and rape to coerce inmates—including 150-pound Rico Garcia and 350-pound Stanley Harris—to square off against one another in an out-of-sight hallway in the bowels of San Francisco County's main jail. Four other deputies reportedly wagered on the bouts.

The resulting injuries were minor, as Neu apparently prohibited hitting in the face. But the deputy allegedly instructed the two men not to seek medical treatment for their wounds, and threatened to thrash them if they did.

The disclosure by the local public defender's office prompted national headlines about the violence in the San Francisco County system—which likely has been going on for some time, including more fights and other forms of physical abuse. But what's unusual about the San Francisco fights is not that they occurred—violence between inmates and guards is routine in prisons across the country. What's truly weird is that the matches were in a county jail, not state or federal prison.

"It was shocking for it to be at 850 [the county jail's downtown address on Bryant Street]," says Eli Crawford. At one time Crawford was a part of a notorious African American prison gang, the Black Guerilla Family. Now, decades later, after about 30 years in federal prison—Crawford jokes that he toured the country on the US government dime—he runs Raw Talk, a program that helps at-risk men and women change their lives.

"I know a guard who used to work downtown [at the jail]," Crawford says. "He called me the other day because he was really fucked up about [the gladiator matches]. You know, because you got these new deputies in here now. These younger guys who've never really been through any of this. They've changed the whole nature of the county jail system—and [Sheriff Ross] Mirkarimi, he's not paying attention."

One reason county jails are unlikely venues for guard-organized fights is that the institutions—and the people inside—aren't as dedicated to the criminal mentality as those in state and federal prison. Simply put, there are fewer killers and other violent men in county jails than prisons. And any uncompromising thugs that happen to locked up in county are only there for a little while as they awaititrial.

"In county jail we're talking about the low levels of criminals, people doing wino time," Joe Loya, a retired bank robber turned author, says. ("Wino time" is prison slang for any stint that's shorter than a year, Loya explains.) "To the prisoners [in jail] they are still people who aren't dedicated to the convict code. It's easier for them to [snitch]."

State and federal prisons are a different story. Perhaps the most egregious example in recent history of guards orchestrating fights among inmates was also in California. In 1996, a number of prison guards at Corcoran State Prison in the San Joaquin valley blew the whistle on abuse dating back years, which included arranging fights in one of the yards. Many of the others go unreported, according to Loya, because of the code of silence that exists between inmates and also between guards. But it's definitely going on.

"People are people, bro," says Jesse De La Cruz, a gang expert with a doctorate in social work. De La Cruz used to be affiliated with a Latino street gang in Northern California, and the prison gang that backs it from the inside. He's served 30 years inside state prisons, rattling off a laundry list that includes so of the country's worst, such as Pelican Bay.

"These [guards], and the majority of the police don't have the ethical training," he tells me. "They walk into a jailhouse and what happens is this: The institution takes hold, and they're surrounded by negative energy on a daily basis. So if they have any dark spots, they come out. It manifests itself. They become just like the monsters that they're caging."

Ultimately, eight prison guards charged by federal prosecutors for the abuses at Corcoran were acquitted in 2000, a verdict De La Cruz marvels at. "Regular people just don't believe officers are capable of that kind of violence," he says. De La Cruz suggests that scandals like the one in San Francisco and Corcoran are unusual. What's more common, he thinks, are day-to-day abuses of the power. Setting a problematic prisoner up for a nasty and violent encounter with an enemy, for example—or simply not stepping in to prevent a clobbering.

"I've been part of the conspiracy to make [guard-sanctioned assault] happen," says Loya, the retired bank robber, who served time in federal prisons across the country. "I know it can happen, I know the human material needed to make it happen. Prisons are corrupting, toxic places that cannibalize those who live and work in them."

The gladiator matches aren't isolated to California. Across the country in St. Louis, a 2012 lawsuit alleged that at least two guards, and possibly more, coerced prisoners to fight one another. Using the promise of special privileges, extra food and snacks, the guards reportedly bribed attackers into fighting others, and like in San Francisco, are accused of making bets on the results. "For a guard it's easy to, you know, get in the ear of a gang banger to promise commissary, or phone calls in exchange for a fight," says Crawford. "The guards know that these young guys don't know anything."

Despite the uproar over the San Francisco scandal, violence and abuse within American prisons is not likely to change any time soon, according to the ex-cons and experts I canvassed. The real issue is the environment—the jail or prison institution itself.

A now–famous Stanford Unviersity experiment published in 1973 by Philip Zimbardo and a research assistant sought to recreate the experience of incarceration for both the jailers and prisoners, and thrust a group of otherwise healthy and non-criminal students into the situation. Essentially, the "guards" quickly grew went off the rails, but they were not permitted by the researchers to use physical violence, and so instead verbally attacked the "inmates."

The power, in other words, went to their heads.

"Prison really is a matter of the strong survive, the weaker members get preyed on," says Rachyll Dempsey, a forensic psychologist who used to conduct mental health evaluations at San Quentin state prison.

Dr. Terry Kupers is a psychiatrist at the Wright Institute—a clinical psychology graduate school in Berkeley—who's studied prisons and the effects they have on the inhabitants. He argues that there are three things needed to create the violent conditions inside the country's jails and prisons: one group of people that has all the power (guards), a second group that has none and no recourse if their rights are violated (inmates), and third, a strict code of silence—"so the perpetrators can do violence and sexual abuse without abandon," as Krupers puts it. He believes that all three conditions are present in the jails and prisons where fights occur—typically maximum security facilities, such as the seventh-floor unit in which the San Francisco inmates resided.

"The solution, the remedy is that there has to be an incredibly good selection of staff, and there has to be really solid education for the guards," Krupers says. "There also has to be outside supervision, because now nobody cares. Society is locking them up and throwing away the key. And society has to take responsibility, and say you can't do that in our name."

After all, despite years of reporting about guard-initiated gladiator fights on Rikers Island, violence there continues nearly full force. Neither the funding New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced—tens of millions of dollars—or an investigation by the Justice Department has changed the culture of brutality in the facility.

Splashy headlines about gladiator-style fighting between inmates aren't likely to spark an overhaul of San Francisco County jails, either.

"It's part of doing time," Loya says. "We understand that violence is bred into jails, and designed into the prison. There are these moments."

Follow Max Cherney on Twitter.

"Night Prelude," the latest single from New York–based electronic artist Glades, is the soundtrack of a bad trip. It's creepy and meandering—just as you get accustomed to one beat, it morphs into something entirely different. Somehow it all just works, but this isn't the type of electronic music you can just leave in the background. It deserves to be sat with and picked apart. Try it.

Check out more about Glades on his Facebook page.

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Photo by the Centers for Disease Control. Via Wikicommons

Shigella is a particularly nasty bacteria that causes Shigellosis, a form of food poisoning featuring bloody diarrhea, painful cramps and rectal spasms, and kills perhaps 1.1 million people per year. Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control issued a warning in which they said international travelers have brought in a new form of the bacteria, and it's spreading within the US. This form features "multidrug resistance," and shows significant strength against Ciprofloxacin, the previous pharmaceutical go-to for drug-resistant Shigella.

In the CDC release, Director Tom Frieden urged caution, not just because this form of Shigella is harder to treat, but because "Shigella spreads so easily between people [that] the potential for more—and larger—outbreaks is a real concern." The outbreak of food poisoning a few years ago that temporarily shut down a Los Angeles-area Souplantation was caused by Shigella.

The CDC issued a comprehensive warning to the public about drug-resistant bacteria back in 2013. In that info-dump, they included Shigella on the list of potential threats, since it was already resistant to "first-line" drugs like ampicillin and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, and just beginning to show signs of Ciprofloxacin-resistance. Since then, the threat of drug-resistant bacteria has stubbornly refused to go away, and Shigella has only become better at fighting off Ciprofloxacin.

As we've pointed out in the past, in the long run, people living today are likely under a greater threat of dying from drug-resistant bacteria than from cancer. While Shigellosis is generally more of a serious bummer than a death sentence, this still isn't just some vague future threat; a potentially deadly form of drug-resistant malaria currently endangers millions in East Asia, for example. Meanwhile, in the US, P. aeruginosa, the bacteria responsible for one out of every ten hospital-acquired infections, was discovered to have not just a drug resistant form in the usual sense, but the new form had acquired "super-resistance," making it able to withstand perhaps every antibiotic we know of.

Frieden added in the release that the CDC is "moving quickly to implement a national strategy to curb antibiotic resistance." Over the past few years, science has indeed discovered new evolutionary mechanisms in bacteria that make them able to adapt to our defenses more quickly than we imagined, and discovered that treating someone with antibiotics might trigger one of those mechanisms. According to many microbiologists, fighting drug resistance means a long-term, complex solution, and we can start by curbing the rampant use of antibiotics in agriculture.

The CDC has been coy about blaming the farming sector for pumping antibiotics into livestock, but a 2013 report did acknowledge the agriculture connection. This particular infection is less related to farming practices than other bacteria, since non-human animals rarely acquire Shigella, according to the World Health Organization. But different species of bacteria appear to "learn" antibiotic resistance from each other, much in the way we humans would spread a hilarious new internet meme, via a process called horizontal gene transfer.

You can probably guess how to keep from getting infected with this germ, but just in case you need a primer on basic sanitation: Wash your own hands, and wash the hands of any children you happen to have around, particularly right before you eat or prepare food, and try not to go drinking any pond water.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

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All photos courtesy of the artist

For rising artist Christine Sun Kim, sound is a "ghost." The multiple-MFA-holding Senior TED Fellow who has had a Whitney Museum residency and exhibited at MoMA, has been profoundly deaf since birth. The sonic hush in which she lives has pushed her towards exploring sound through her work in a varied oeuvre of performance, installation, drawing, and video.

Initially, Kim strove to translate sound into direct visual terms. She experimented with vibrations, placing coated paintbrushes and inked quills on wooden boards atop subwoofers and speakers pulsing with ambient noise. Her process resulted in lovely minimalist paintings, audibles turned objets d'art. But the project felt like translating a text using only half the alphabet. "Low frequency sounds—vibrations—only make up a very small fraction of the sound world," she explains. When it came to capturing the rich tapestry of Kim's lived experience with sound, this approach fell short.

Recognizing that facilitating paint-stained traces of vibrations was only one component of making the sonic visible, Kim tried a different tack. The artist produced her own semiotics of sound by piecing together a tangle of overlapping languages and systems, including musical notation, body language, and American Sign Language (ASL), which she describes as similar to sound in its intrinsic spatiality.

Her information system make the rigid definition of sound as anesthetized vibrations meeting a hearing ear feel nothing short of antiquated. It does this by capturing life in a world where sound isfunneled more through social interactions than through ears. Because of this, experiencing her work is similar to the moment when one realizes listening to the same song in the dark is different than hearing it in the light.

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Kim spent much of her life mirroring others' relationships to sound in an effort to follow a culturally dominant "sound etiquette." Growing up animated in a less effusive Korean family (a facet, she points out, of both Korean and hearing cultures), Kim learned quietness—"to tone it down"—in response to eyes upon her. "At first I thought I experience sound mostly through vibrations, but I realized it's much more than that," she explains. "I'm mostly informed by the way people react and behave around it and then I in turn mirror them, sometimes out of good manners." In her artistic practice, Kim strives to reclaim sound, to carve out a space where sound doesn't revolve around some borrowed etiquette, but instead around her own distinct experience.

Avant-garde composer John Cage declared sound to be the most public of senses, and it hasn't been a private experience for Kim. To the contrary, she describes the deaf community as a "collective culture." Built through a shared experience of sound and language, the deaf community has its own sound etiquette: for example, the artist explains, if someone joins a table, it is customary that people move back their chairs to let the newcomer in without looking up, so those at the table can continue to watch whomever is signing. Regardless of her audience, a predilection for the communal is in Kim's nature, and her art is frequently collaborative and participatory. "I often collaborate with others in order to make my voice known or relevant," she says. "People are almost an extension of myself, namely sign language interpreters."

Collaboration was integral to Kim's recent sonic performance piece Fingertap Quartet. In putting together the piece, the artist provided a list of 12 specific sounds to her musician friend, Dev Hynes of Blood Orange (a later version featured voice samples by Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu). Kim remarks: "I trusted [Dev] enough to make voice samples based on my instructions and I did not ask anyone to double-check for me. Conceptually, I leased his voice." Using the voice samples, an audio recorder, a laptop, and transducers, Kim created four sound files. With projected text, she communicated the concept underlying each sound file to her audience: "Like/Good," a sound you like and think is good; the converse sound, "No Like/No Good"; "Like/No Good," a sound you like but suspect might not be good; and a sound you don't like but suspect might not be good, "No Like/Good."

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Kim's participatory performances "have a lot to do with the social value of each person's voice," she explains. In Subjective Loudness, 200 Tokyo residents helped Kim convert a list of 85-decibel noises into a score, effectively "becoming her voice." For 4x4, Kim invited four individuals whose voices she respects—an entrepreneur, an artist, a designer, and a musician—to sing her lyrics. Kim then distorted the voices by playing them at a frequency below human hearing range; for a night, a Stockholm gallery space was filled with her inaudible song as its low frequencies rattled the gallery's windows and doors. In Face Opera, one of Kim's favorite works (interestingly, her preference is for her performances), the artist and a group of her friends—all prelingually deaf—formed an unconventional choir. Upon Kim's cues, a "conductor" moved his or her eyebrows, mouth, cheeks, and eyes to convey a concept. To perform Kim's score—which was separated into acts like "I want to trust you" and "Grass"— the "singers" echoed and responded to the nuances of the conductor's facial markers. Kim estimates that 30 to 40 percent of ASL is manual production while the rest is expressed through the face and body movements. Face Opera alluded to the extent to which ASL relies upon facial expression and implied that attention to the nuances of facial expression can constitute hearing.

Kim's work is conceptually strong, but its real power comes from the way it honors and dignifies her own experience. In the perceptual regime that is hearing culture, Kim tells dominant sonic norms to go screw themselves. They represent a limiting etiquette, not her actual relationship with sound. As Kim pointed out in a past TED interview: "It was not like society gave me a clear, safe space to do whatever I wanted. I had to learn how to integrate their ways."

Kim's art doesn't acquiesce. It makes its own rules, taking sound on her own terms. And yet, even though she doesn't aim to be political and is more focused on expressing her personal trajectory, when reflecting on her art, one could point to that rallying cry of second-wave feminism: "The personal is political."

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The mentality that imbues Kim's work came front and center at a recent TED2015 conference. At the conference, Kim tried on a prototype of a vest—both a vest in the traditional sense and a handy abbreviation for Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer—that translates sound into vibration patterns. The vest is intended for the deaf as an alternative to the invasive cochlear implant. Kim thinks that the vest could be useful. With it, she could localize sound in space, which would help her plan and develop future sound installations. But in a recent interview with TED Fellow Renée Hlozek, Kim made an apt point, asking: "Why should I receive training on how to recognize speech through vibration patterns? I'm falling into the same behavioral trap again. The vest is mediating communication, but the problem is it's only mediating it one way, making the hearing people understood by me." Kim's art represents one small chip in that normative block.

Check out more of Christine's Christine Sun Kim's work here.

It started out well enough.

Tens of thousands of people gathered in Montreal's Victoria Square, the heart of what's left of its financial heft, waving banners, shouting slogans, hugging, smiling, high-fiving, smoking weed, all with the intent of sticking it to Quebec's Liberal premier, Philippe Couillard, and his austerity budget. Thursday's march was the apex of a two-week campaign against a budget denounced by unions, by health care workers, by teachers, by those with disabilities, and by university students—especially university students. The demo was supposed to be the culmination of all their efforts, and to demand that Couillard reverse his budget cuts and re-invest in Quebec's once-generous public spending.

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Last month, we debuted the trailer of Claire Christerson's short film Off Season, promising to run the film in its entirety as a Saturday morning cartoon on April 4th, since it was inspired by kids' TV shows like Spongebob, Sesame Street, and Teletubbies. Well, here you go. Since it's an adult cartoon, we decided not to post it until later in the day, when sensible adults wake up.

Read more about the film in our previous article.

See more of Claire Christerson's work on her website, and see her previous contributions to VICE as part of the artist duo Mike and Claire here.

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Image via Wikimedia Commons

On Wednesday, a court in Dresden, Germany, sentenced 56-year-old Detlev Guenzel to eight and a half years in prison for the apparently consensual murder and dismemberment of Wojciech Stempniewicz. Guenzel met Stempniewicz, a 59-year-old businessman originally from Poland but living in Hanover, on a cannibal fetishist website and arranged to rendezvous at Guenzel's bed and breakfast, the Pension Gimmlitztal in Hartmannsdorf-Reichenau, near the Czech border.

Guenzel, a father of three and a former cop who served as a handwriting expert in Dresden for three decades, has been described as a kind and courteous person. (His partner of ten years never knew about his proclivities and left him, going into hiding soon after his crime emerged.) But unbeknownst to many, he'd been exploring an interest in consensual cannibalism for some time. The two men began messaging over the fetish site in October 2013, in a thread titled "Schlachtfest," a German term for a feast after a pig's slaughter. Stempniewicz referred to himself as "Heszla-Longpig," the latter part of the handle referring to colonial explorers' euphemism for human flesh eaten by cannibalistic societies. The records clearly showed both men's intent and consent.

"The victim had been fantasizing about being killed and eaten by someone else since his youth," the Daily Mail quoted Dresden Police Chief Dieter Kroll as saying soon after the death in 2013.

They eventually met on November 4, 2013. The details of Stempniewicz's demise remain fuzzy and were contested at trial, but Guenzel clearly dismembered his corpse and buried the cubed remains in his garden, making a 50-minute home movie of the act.

During the trial, police played the video, deleted but reconstructed by the authorities, behind closed doors. It showed Guenzel, in his underwear and covered in blood, listening to pop music as he hacked at Stempniewicz's corpse, occasionally stopping to listen for a heartbeat.

Because the victim's corpse was so badly mutilated, no one could determine the cause of death, which became the trial's main point of contention. The defense tried to prove that Stempniewicz had choked himself to death in Guenzel's sex dungeon, which would mean that Guenzel had only "disturbed the dead" by hacking him up with a knife and electric saw. Guenzel was found guilty of murder in the end, but his sentence was lighter than the one the state was seeking.

All the headlines surrounding this case talk about "cannibalism," but it's arguably a better example of the odder and more modern phenomenon of vorephilia. Vores, as people like Guenzel and Stempneiwicz are known, are people who derive satisfaction (sexual or otherwise) from the thought of eating, being eaten, or watching people or animals eat each other. A rare enough proclivity that they don't show up in the DSM, vores can still be broken down into subcategories: Some like the thought of being swallowed into a man's scrotum through his urethra, some enjoy images of women being trussed up to roast in the oven, and so on. Those who are into gory depictions of actual cannibalism are an extreme minority, and, obviously, hardly anyone actually acts on these fantasies, even if they have them.

The few accounts of self-identified vores recorded by clinicians describe them as basically normal individuals. Often they do not conceive of their desires as a wish to murder or be murdered, but an obsession with the idea of being taken in wholly by another person.

Historically, it's been difficult for vores to explore or indulge their fantasies. But as it has with so many obscure subcultures, the internet has brought vores together in a handful of forums like the infamous Cannibal Cafe (which was shut down by German authorities in 2002) and the still-active extreme fetish space Dolcett Girls. Most individuals use these websites to play around with Photoshop, find fantasy films, and exchange messages with each other, never intending to act out their desires. But a few have used these digital spaces to find each other to actualize cannibalistic tableaus in recent years.

Guenzel's case was not the first successful meet-up of willing chef and entrée to make headlines—not even the first in Germany. Back in 2001, a computer technician Armin Meiwes killed and ate a man who apparently wanted to be eaten. Meiwes became a famous case study for psychologists interested in vorarephilia, and he had no problem candidly describing his impulses as arising between ages of eight and 12. An intense sense of loneliness and abandonment led him to start thinking about eating his school friends, a compulsion nurtured by horror films and watching his neighbors slaughter farm animals. Although often described as a user of Cannibal Café, Meiwes actually used a private gay cannibals forum to post about 60 advertisements in search of a willing young man to be eaten while designing a windowless slaughter room equipped with a cage, meathooks, and other accouterments in his farmhouse.

Eventually, he found Bernd Jürgen Armando Brandes, an engineer who was really into the prospect, and started exchanging extremely sensual and sickening messages with him.

"Warm blood flows... I don't have any chance to escape my slaughter at the last moment," wrote Brandes in one message. "It's a real turn-on, the feeling of being at your mercy, being in your possession. Having to give up my flesh."

"It'll be awesome, anyway," replied Meiwes, "your tasty body on show like that."

Meiwes described his slaughter of Brandes in graphic detail, and took a two-hour video of the whole affair. Both men worked together to amputate Brandes's penis, found it too touch to eat, fried it in his own fat and spices, but deemed it inedible. Then Brandes, who'd taken 20 sleeping pills and drunk half a bottle of schnapps after openly consenting to his murder, allowed himself to slowly bleed to death in a warm bath while Meiwes waited, before finally stabbing him in the throat. Miewes whispered to the corpse in the video as he carved it into 66 pounds of flesh, which he froze and then ate over the course of ten months before his capture. An Austrian college student doing research found one of his advertisements, seeking a new victim, and turned him over to police who found 15 pounds of Brandes remaining in the murder's freezer.

At his trial, psychiatrists determined that neither Meiwes nor Brandes were, so far as they could tell, mentally ill. Meiwes also tried to draw a line between murder and cannibalism, stating that he didn't really want to kill Brandes, but did want to eat him, saying that the experience was a merging of souls that allowed him to take on some of Brandes's characteristics and skills, like speaking better English. In the end, in 2004 the courts gave him eight and a half years in prison, but public outrage led to the trial being reopened. In 2006 he got life in prison instead. Meiwes now claims that he regrets his actions, has become a vegetarian, and speaks out about voreraphilia in order to dissuade others from acting out their fantasies and desires like he did.

More common are cases of consensual cannibalism gone awry. In 2011, an unnamed Swiss man figured out that the Slovak man he had been discussing fantasies with was serious about acting on his impulses and turned their meet-up into a police sting, resulting in the eater's death in a gun battle. Last year, Dale Bolinger, a nurse in England, had tried to meet up with an underage girl he met on the Dark Fetish Network to eat her, claiming that he'd eaten other young women before, resulting in an FBI sting against him.

Perhaps the most interesting vore-related case was that of the 28-year-old New York police officer Gilberto Valle in 2013, who never acted on his fantasies but was charged with conspiracy to kidnap and assault women after a list of people he'd like to eat and vivid fantasies about their brutalization, rape, and dismemberment were uncover. Debates raged around whether Valle was actually a threat , or whether he was just harmlessly subverting dark but inherent impulses into fantasy in a way that wouldn't escalate.

Another, more controversial, issue surrounds IRL cannibalism: Where do we draw the lines of consent between grown humans, and can they extend to behavior that is not only harmful, but deadly?

"Consenting adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to," Perro Loco, a psudonomymous moderator on vore fetishist forums, told the Awl in 2011, "up to and including killing each other. If they don't consent to it, then it's murder and not good."

But to the vast majority of us if someone wants to be killed and eaten or to do the killing and eating means there's something disturbed in those individuals. And if they're mentally unstable, can they consent to anything? Such a naked, erotic desire for death is so disturbing that it doesn't seem possible for it to be treated like ordinary desire. And we're no closer to working out our collective legal, moral, and psychological confusion after Guenzel's relatively light sentence, which may well inspire further outrage.

This post originally appeared on VICE Australia.

My cat is kind of a dickhead. His name is Alfie and he bites and scratches everyone, usually around the eyes and the jugular. Most people hate him, but I know that deep down he's a good guy. He just needs some therapy or something.

In an effort to find what that something might be, I stumbled across a site on holistic animal healing. As you'd expect, this is basically an extension of human-based alternative medicine and includes stuff like chakra cleansing, which is about purifying centers of power in the body; and Reiki, which is an energy-focused healing treatment that is usually done by touch. I discovered there was a cutely-named clinic nearby me called Pawsitive Animal Therapies that offered these remedies for "pets that exhibit behavioral or emotional issues such as stress, anxiety, fear, or aggression." It sounded like my answer.

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I squashed Alfie into the cat box and off we went. Melissa, the owner and therapist behind Pawsitive met us at a nondescript building, but then lead us down an alleyway, through an unmarked wooden door, and into an average looking backyard. There was a shed in the corner and Melissa beckoned us inside.

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With Alfie still in his box, I offered some facts about his age, weight, exercise, diet, and general ill temperament. Melissa recommended Reiki and a massage to help chill him out. Then she laid him across the table, closed her eyes, and lay her hands on his fur. The room was silent and Alfie lay uncharacteristically still. Things seemed to be going pretty well.

In 2012, which is the year of the last study, Australians spent an estimated $1.2 billion dollars on "other" pet care services. This included such services as fitness classes, photography, as well as pet therapy like the one I tried. Dogs received the bulk of these expenditures, but felines still got a sizeable chunk of $16 million, spread among about eight percent of the nation's cats. However, dog owners from New South Wales, where I'm from, are the ones most likely to indulge in pet therapy. So although he didn't know it, Alfie was pretty damn lucky.

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He obviously didn't know it because he started hissing. "If he's going to be like that," murmured Melissa, "I'll have to do Reiki from a distance." She sat still with her palms facing up, breathing deeply. Alfie went for a bit of a walk.

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According to Melissa, Alfie's problems stem from his childhood. "Being taken away from his mother at such a young age diminished his heart chakra," she explained. "He was never shown a family hierarchy so he now mistakenly believes that he's the head of your family. It's like he thinks he's a human." At this signal, Alfie elegantly lifted his leg and started licking his balls.

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To distract from the awkward ball-licking, I asked Melissa how she got into animal Reiki. She explained that she'd grown up on a farm and always loved animals, but found putting them down as a vet too disturbing. She wanted to help animals holistically. Like a lot of therapists, she does that through massages, Bowen Therapy (cross-fibre massage), Craniosacral therapy (head and spine work), and Reiki (energy healing).

"I prefer to be next to the animal," said Melissa with her palms still out. "But I find Reiki from a distance works just as effectively." She went on to explain that the animal doesn't even need to be in the room. Sometimes animals can be as far away as the US and the process is still the same. "I get clients to send a photo of their pets and I can perform the treatments telepathically," she said in a matter of fact voice.

Meanwhile Alfie had chilled out completely. Melissa's diagnosis was that his head and heart chakra were in competition with each other. This was why he showed affection but didn't want to look weak. Typical cat. And with that, the session was over.

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In the car ride home, Alfie made a horrendous noise like a vacuum cleaner sucking up a fork. It was vicious and awful, but that night he cuddled me in bed. That's never happened before. And although he's been meowing a lot recently, he does seem calmer. I was suspicious but I'll admit it: I think something weird happened in that shed. I can't explain it, and Alfie won't say anything about it, but he's definitely become a nicer pet.

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A woman at the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. Photo via Flickr user Zoriah

There are 51.2 million refugees in the world who've had to abandoned their homes, their countries, and the lives they built in hopes of finding a better existence somewhere else. Some of these people have suffered gang rapes, been locked in a cell and beaten for days on end, or had to watch as their entire family was slaughtered.

This kind of intense trauma obviously merits some time on a therapists couch. However, in and around the sprawling camps that have emerged to support the growing refugee populations in Jordan, Turkey, Kenya, and around the world, very few receive the psychological support they desperately need. The consequences of this neglect can have very real security implications, along with the obvious humanitarian ones.

"There is probably no group of people more in need of psychological care than refugees," United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Melissa Fleming told me in an email. "They are traumatized by violence and scarred by loss. And very often, their uncertain life in exile exposes them to more challenges than they are mentally prepared to handle."

An oft-overlooked aspect of the bleak lives of refugees is the security threat their untreated trauma can pose. The psychological neglect of desperate refugees gives recruiters for extremist groups like ISIS and Boko Haram an opportunity to use intense emotional turmoil as a recruitment tool. "One of the key concepts that has emerged in the study of radicalization is that of the cognitive opening," explained Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Head of Research and Information at the International Center for the Study of Radicalization. "It's a moment in someone's life that makes them question their identity, their understanding of the world. That moment can be a natural progression for someone who never integrated into society, but it can also be sparked by a traumatic event."

Children and teenagers are particularly likely to find their cognitive openings steering them towards violence. "There is clear evidence that at any age, but particularly as an adolescent, when you don't have access to school or dignified forms of employment, you are at risk of being exploited and tempted into anti-social behavior," Robinson said. "When you have a trauma-related disorder, you may be so disturbed as a young person that you want to go back to Syria to fight," Dragoul agreed. Recruiters know this. As Meleagrou-Hitchens elaborated, "Areas near refugee camps, many of which have now become permanent towns, are major recruitment grounds."

Another factor complicating access to treatment is the stigma surrounding mental health in many refugee communities. Robinson once treated migrant workers on the Thai-Burma border, many of whom had been victims of torture. She learned quickly that "if you had a clinic with a sign over the door that said 'Mental Health Clinic,' no one would go. Mental health was for 'crazy' people."

But perhaps the most significant reason refugees' psychological needs are so vastly unmet is because of the intangible nature of those needs. "There is not a lot of funding or attention given to mental health," Robinson said. "The priorities are food and medicine and shelter, and basic protection against forced repatriation. Mental health is seen as a 'softer' service, like education or reproductive health."

Unlike other priorities, the outcome of offering psychological counseling is uncertain. If you give someone food, they will not starve. If you give someone heated shelter, they will not freeze to death. If you give someone counseling, they may still be depressed, abusive, or recruited by militants. Donors and relief agencies seek to spend their limited resources on initiatives that are as risk-free as possible. Counseling, however important, offers far from certain redress.

But investing in refugees' mental health could have a significant positive impact on these sprawling populations, in the long run. Refugees treated for trauma might re-acquire the cognitive capacity to re-build their lives, to move out of camps and into more stable lives. It is highly unlikely that those who do not get treatment will be able to do so. People who feel vulnerable and shattered will turn to whoever makes them feel safe. Offering refugees psychological care is one way to make civil society seem more like that safe haven, rather than the ever-welcoming arms of the world's extremist recruiters.

Follow Elizabeth Nicholas on Twitter.

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All photos by Julieta Cervantes

Gideon Irving is a professional skipper of towns. Before his current tour in collaboration with the Foundry Theater, Living Here: A Map of Songs, he was traversing New Zealand on a bicycle, schlepping all of his equipment with him in a trailer, as he went looking for places to stay and perform.

"I thought I'd try to gain a little sympathy from folks," Irving told me, "And see if it would help me get into their homes, if they pitied the fool who was lugging 200 pounds of instruments on a trailer over the mountain."

Once he found a home for the night, he'd put on his show—a concert interlaced with stories, jokes, and improvised chat. This is Irving's practice: He is a vagabond singing storyteller, performing in people's private homes in exchange for their stories, their audience, and a bed (or a couch, or a floor) to sleep on for the night. As he travels, Irving builds his network of venues by asking audiences to write their adventurous friends' names and numbers on a map of the world. Those names and numbers become his database of venues—homes where he'll go in the future, perform, and stay the night.

Irving's current show, Living Here: A Map of Songs, is taking him across all five boroughs of New York. I saw him perform on a Thursday evening on the Upper West Side in a brownstone.

When I arrived at the show, I was greeted at the door of the home by an officialish woman with a clipboard (one of a number of differences between Irving's independent shows and his current collaboration with the Foundry). Upstairs, I was met by Irving, who shook my hand firmly and did that trick where you repeat someone's name to build intimacy, and also to help you remember it. He took me to the living room and introduced me to two perfect blonde twins, a boy and a girl—the hostesses' kids. "This is Jennifer," he said my name like we were old pals. (This, I would later discover, is Irving's way with people: cutting through the time-consuming small talk and speeding straight to the stage of friendship.) "She writes for VICE. But you guys probably don't know what that is." The boy shook his head, then ran down the hallway, barefoot in his own home. Irving would perform barefoot, too.

I walked to the kitchen to hang up my coat on a makeshift rack, peeking around the house before settling onto a couch in the giant living room, where a basic stage and set had been placed. Irving's practice is as much an act of curious, art-sanctioned voyeurism as it is anything else. Who doesn't want to travel the world looking into people's lives?

That's sort of the overriding sentiment of Irving's show: He's falling in love all the time. He's falling in love with his audience right now.

As the audience settled in for the show, I found myself seated next to a dad and his preteen daughter. When I asked him how he knew about the show, he grinned, "Oh, we're great friends with Melanie!" and gestured vaguely to his right. I had no idea who Melanie was. "Of course!" I said, trying to adopt Irving's air of at-homeness.

It was time for the show, which flew by like a fever dream. Irving is nothing if not charismatic, and the audience was rapt with attention—with the exception of the boy twin, who shouted up at the stage "Do maaaagic!" from his mother's lap. Irving laughed, and pointed at a singed spot in his set. "A few nights ago, I almost set the stage on fire, buddy. That's what happens when I try magic."

Over the course of the 90 minutes that followed, Irving played songs that ranged from full-out ballads to ten-second riffs, playing on a guitar and an instrument that looked like a sitar and an accordion that he'd been given by a postal service worker named Joe. Irving is a versatile musician with a powerful, emotive voice. He toys with synths and beats and at one point, he asks for an iPhone from the crowd and builds a little symphony out of that shitty, tinny ditty that wakes me up every morning. He mixes the tech stuff in alongside good, old-fashioned acoustic strings. Think of Irving as the lovechild of The Tallest Man on Earth and Ben Folds. But louder.

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Irving's art is about his travels and he travels for his art. His songs are about the people he's met and the places he's stayed. And his philosophy is simple. "People ask, 'But don't you wanna put down roots?' Yes!" he says to the audience. "But I wanna put them down everywhere." Irving doesn't want kids, he explains in the show. He wants his audiences to have kids, though, kids who he can stay with and perform for, when they're grown. "People ask, 'But don't you wanna fall in love?'" Irving pauses. "I fall in love all. The. Time."

While the notion of the traveling troubadour could trace its roots back by millennia, Irving was inspired by Julian Koster, a modern-day vagabond singer and circus performer. "I started traveling in late 2011, after seeing [Koster] perform a show in a home. It opened my eyes to the idea of homes as a venue. I wanted to give that a go, and my best friend Hubcap told me that New Zealand would be a great place to try building a new show in people's homes because when acts go on tour over there, no one ever plays small towns."

When Irving would arrive on the other side of a mountain or valley to small New Zealand towns, he was almost always met with a warm welcome. "People were so happy that I'd worked so hard to get where they were," he told me. "They were very hospitable; it allowed me to develop a show and a practice."

Irving performed to a community of Māoris, the indigenous Polynesians of New Zealand. He even stayed in family home next door to the current Māori King, Tuheitia Paki. "It was interesting," Irving reminisced, "I got to go on a little tour of the palace and the traditional royal meeting ground. It was very ornate; whenever dignitaries are visiting, they entertain them there. But when they don't have any foreign guests, the king just lives in this little house next to all these other families and people see him on the street and call him 'King!'"

Back in the United States, he continued to travel and gather more material for his art, performing in places that ranged from the most expensive apartment in America (the subject of one of the songs in his latest show) to a geodesic dome in the Redwoods.

In the middle of his show, Irving sings about his life spent multitasking. When you've met as many people has he has, and you're trying to keep in touch with them all while on the road, corners get cut in the service of postcards and stamps. While singing "Postcard" (I just want a little more love / from a lot more people all the time / I want to be everyone's favorite / and favorite them every and all to be mine ... from Norway to Jersey, Phoenix to Turkey, Paris to Palestine), Irving hopped around the audience to deliver postcards to a few of us. Mine read:

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As he closed out his show, Irving took an unexpected, but moving, turn towards the traditional, crooning out a slow rendition of "There's No Business Like Show Business." And when Irving sang, "Everything about it is appealing... everything the traffic will allow..." I know he meant it. This is a man who spends up to six hours a day driving and biking alone on foreign roads, before hopping on stage to do his show.

When I spoke with Irving a few days after his show, I asked him what story he's trying to tell his audience. He didn't miss a beat. "To be unreasonable," he said. "Everything I've done since beginning this project has seemed kind of silly, and maybe too difficult or complicated to get done. But I've found that when I commit to that kind of idea, and share it with other people, they get excited about it and want to be a part of it. And once you've done one unreasonable thing, people have a little more faith in you. That faith has given me a lot of strength and confidence to not shy away from any absurd idea. I want to build an elaborate show that's performed for just one person each night. It's incredible to see people inspired and responsive to taking risks, to inspire them to do unreasonable things themselves."

Gideon Irving's Living Here: A Map of Songs continues through May 2. Tickets are available via The Foundry Theater. Irving will also be performing at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Follow Jennifer Schaffer on Twitter.