It’s early afternoon, and I’ve just finished shopping for fresh fish and vegetables at Mercado San Martín. Now I’m standing at the bar of a small restaurant located deep in San Sebastián’s Old Town, eating txipirones en su tinta, a Basque dish of small squid cooked in its ink, and sipping a glass of house txakoli, the white wine from this region. Around me are the sounds of dishes clattering, wine bottles plunged back into ice buckets, and conversations in different languages. The air smells faintly of garlic, tomato, and fried food. I’ve returned to the Basque Country this summer for a month, but this time in San Sebastian.
There are a handful of reasons I came back, but one of the top ones on my list was to deepen my knowledge of Basque cuisine and improve my skills in cooking it properly. I’ve admired it’s blend of tradition, technique, and regional pride for years, but respect from a distance feels insufficient. In addition to cooking Japanese food (more specifically, Washoku), I cross-train in and want to master Comida Vasca. Slowly, yes, but seriously.
The appeal of Basque cuisine runs deep. It’s not just the Marmitako (fish stew) or the pintxos or the Chuletón (i.e., fire-grilled meats). It’s the variety of flavors, the regional variation, and, in my estimation, once you can cook Basque food, you can almost master any other. It’s how a dish can be both simple and impossibly technical, how a cider house dinner can feel like both a celebration and a history lesson.
Like my experience in Bilbao two summers ago, to immerse myself, I enrolled in a week-long Spanish class. I’ve managed for years with broken Spanish, but it was time to move beyond survival mode. (Although Spanish isn’t the only language here. Euskera, the Basque language, is everywhere, from street signs to the hum of the market.)
Unfortunately, unlike my previous experience in 2023 when I took a week-long workshop at the Basque Culinary Center, it had closed for its summer break. (Welcome to August in Europe).
And like hell was I going to do one or more cooking classes with tourists (typically young couples and families with bored teenagers) that last a couple of hours and focus on completing pre-prepared and basic dishes. Been there, done that.
At one point, I seriously considered doing a stage (an unpaid internship) at a local Basque restaurant. But the idea of getting barked at in a foreign language (cuz I’m incredibly slow in food preparation and slightly deaf), while working on a book deadline (more about this later), gave me pause.
So I turned the limitation into a challenge: learn as much as possible independently, shop and eat with intention, visit the markets, the highly ranked restaurants and pintxo bars, speak to and observe the people who work there, and the ones who visit, ask for recommendations, and push beyond my culinary comfort zone. For example, when I go to the market, I watch what locals purchase. I ask them why they are buying particular types of food, and how they are preparing it. Also, understand that certain types of food are in season throughout the year. At the beginning of July, for example, fish like Bonito del Norte and Sardines are in season, and both are served simply grilled.
To the extent possible, my days were like a ritual. I went to the market and purchased what I would prepare for one of our meals, then ate lunch or dinner, sometimes alone or with my wife at local joints, using these situations to study breadth, technique, and ingredient combinations.
Since committing to this cross-training approach (a few years ago), I’ve become a relentless student. I’ve read cookbooks and articles, watched documentaries, taken notes, snapped photos, and pinned enjoyable and promising restaurants on Google Maps. Just like my practice with Washoku, I constantly try new recipes. These are typically dishes that I may have eaten somewhere but have never made. Part of this process involves trying to emulate the masters.
At a sidrería, I watched cider poured from enormous barrels, caught mid-air in tilted glasses, a technique that aerates the cider and connects drinkers to centuries of tradition. The ritualistic precision fascinated me: the angle of the pour, the timing, the way the server never looked at the glass but somehow never missed.
Instead of formal instruction, I’m building skills and knowledge through sustained observation, deliberate practice, and immersion in context. Like an athlete improving their ability through different exercises, I’m developing my Basque cooking technique through study, ingredient usage and substitution, cultural exploration, and repetition. This method requires patience. The ability to excel at cooking Basque food, or any other cuisine, improves through sustained attention, the willingness to understand why certain combinations of ingredients work, how regional variations affect the end product, and what makes a perfect txuleta or a properly balanced salsa verde.
I’m learning that mastery in any cuisine (or activity) demands more than fidelity to a recipe. It requires understanding the culture that created the food, the ingredients that define it, and the techniques that are used. In the Basque Country, that means respecting both tradition and innovation, precision, intuition, and improvisation.
Curiosity, consistency, and humility are also important. That’s how I’m moving forward, one dish at a time.
Photo credit
Title: txerri txuleta (similar to a pork chuleta)
from https://www.instagram.com/adventuresinbasquecooking/
Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/IMG_7623-1-scaled.jpg19202560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-08-17 20:48:092025-08-17 22:04:04Sharpening my Chops in San Sebastián
Governments and private foundations spend considerable resources each year on prison education (i.e., courses in literacy, vocational skills, and higher education), believing they reduce recidivism and improve reentry success.
But outcomes vary widely. Some programs transform lives; others barely make a difference. The problem? We have little reliable evidence on which work, which fails, and why.
Small sample sizes, inconsistent metrics, and a narrow focus on single programs, facilities, or countries hinder most of this research.
The result is a patchwork of findings that offer little practical guidance for shaping policy or directing funding.
We can change that. A global database of correctional education programs and their outcomes would allow us to better compare results among programs and across borders, identify the most effective models, and adapt them to local contexts, while ending investments in approaches that don’t deliver.
It doesn’t require a billion-dollar grant. We could start small by crowdsourcing data from researchers, NGOs, and practitioners who are already tracking results. Over time, governments, international bodies, and foundations could fund and maintain the platform.
Right now, we build most correctional educational programs on hope and anecdote. With shared knowledge, we could ensure that our investments deliver measurable impact, maximizing education behind bars into one of the most powerful tools for rehabilitation the world has ever known.
Photo credit
Title: database
Photographer: Christophe Benoit
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/21828243446_136614fc89_o-scaled.jpg19202560Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-08-10 06:22:222025-08-10 06:22:22How a Global Prison Education Database Could Improve Rehabilitation Outcomes
Canada is often portrayed, by Canadians and outsiders alike, as a peaceable kingdom. A safe, polite, largely nonviolent country. Aside from a handful of gritty television series that have made their way out of Canada, the True North is generally depicted as an exceptional place to live, work, or vacation.
But thirty years ago, I set out to challenge one of those myths. At the time, I was living outside of Canada, in the United States, and I was struck by how pervasive the news coverage of violence was, and the adaptations people made as a response. I began to wonder: Why do Canadians behave as if they’re immune to the same dynamics? There’s plenty of violence in Canada, too.
That question became the seed for Violence in Canada: Sociopolitical Perspectives, a book I edited at the beginning of my academic career. Now, three decades later, it seems worth reflecting on the origins of the project, what it accomplished, and how the landscape has shifted since its publication.
What I Set Out to Do
At the time, I had several goals. Like many early-career academics, I was trying to build my academic street cred. But this wasn’t some cynical résumé-padding exercise. Violence in Canada was also a personal homage to my primary mentor, Ted Robert Gurr, who had co-edited the classic Violence in America with Hugh Graham. That book lasted through three editions, each expanding and evolving with new material. Gurr and Graham’s Violence in America didn’t just map patterns; it helped shape scholarly and national conversations about crime, protest, and power. I hoped Violence in Canada could do something similar. Gurr, graciously, agreed to write the foreword to Violence in Canada.
I also saw the book as a necessary intervention. The popular image of Canada as a haven from violence, not just physical violence, but structural and state violence, struck me as dangerously incomplete and disengenuous. I wanted to compile a volume that would push back against that complacency.
Building the Book
All books begin as a proposal, and Violence in Canada was no different. I shopped the idea around and received the most promising feedback from Oxford University Press Canada. I also invited academics whose work I respected to contribute chapters. Although I had a lot of energy, I was still ABD (all but dissertation) at the time, which probably didn’t help. I’m sure some contributors wondered who the hell I was. Nevertheless, I was truly blessed by having so many respected scholars who specialized in facets of violence in Canada agree to write chapters for the book.
Violence in Canada, and another project I was working on at the same time, Controlling State Crime, formed the foundation of my early publishing experience. Editing Violence in Canada taught me a lot about how edited scholarly books come together, and later, I would reflect on that process in a newsletter article and two peer-reviewed pieces.
Reception and Legacy
Originally published by Oxford, the book had a solid run. It received mostly positive reviews, was relatively well cited, and eventually went into a second edition.
Still, it wasn’t without criticism. Some activists argued that the book failed to address structural violence, a critique that I think would’ve been answered more clearly had they read both Gurr’s and my forewords. But the feedback was instructive, and I don’t dismiss it. Structural violence in Canada deserved more sustained engagement then, and it certainly does now.
One of the central arguments of the book was that much of the violence in Canada happens out of sight behind closed doors. And since the book’s publication, research has continued to validate that claim. Peer-reviewed articles, government reports, and NGO investigations have all helped uncover the less visible but deeply embedded patterns of violence in Canadian life.
Canada Today
In the three decades since the book’s release, the level of violence in Canada has fluctuated, much like in the United States. But overall, Canada still experiences less violence per capita. This isn’t accidental.
A combination of factors—stricter gun control laws, lower levels of poverty and inequality, and universal healthcare (including mental health services), have all played a role. That doesn’t mean we’re anywhere close to utopia. Ask a First Nations woman living on or near a reservation, or a street cop patrolling the inner city of Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, whether Canada is nonviolent. They’ll either laugh at you or stare at you in disbelief.
The myth of the peaceable kingdom isn’t dead and may never die.
But treating Canada as immune to the forces that produce violence elsewhere is more than naïve. It’s dangerous.
Looking Ahead
Violence in Canada was never intended to be the final word. It was a starting point, a provocation, and an attempt to push the conversation forward. Thirty years later, the book feels both dated and oddly prescient. Much has changed in terms of policies, practices, and laws, but arguably not enough.
Violence in Canada as a process didn’t begin with colonization, and it didn’t end with a book (even one that made its way into a second edition). The challenge remains: to ask hard questions about who gets hurt, how, and why, and to confront the myths some people cling to in the name of national exceptionalism.
https://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/Screenshot-2025-08-03-at-8.31.44-AM.png7301188Jeffrey Ian Rosshttps://jeffreyianross.com/wp-content/uploads/jeffrey-ian-ross-logo-04.pngJeffrey Ian Ross2025-08-03 12:29:572025-08-04 21:16:17Thirty Years After VIOLENCE IN CANADA
Sharpening my Chops in San Sebastián
/by Jeffrey Ian RossIt’s early afternoon, and I’ve just finished shopping for fresh fish and vegetables at Mercado San Martín. Now I’m standing at the bar of a small restaurant located deep in San Sebastián’s Old Town, eating txipirones en su tinta, a Basque dish of small squid cooked in its ink, and sipping a glass of house txakoli, the white wine from this region. Around me are the sounds of dishes clattering, wine bottles plunged back into ice buckets, and conversations in different languages. The air smells faintly of garlic, tomato, and fried food. I’ve returned to the Basque Country this summer for a month, but this time in San Sebastian.
There are a handful of reasons I came back, but one of the top ones on my list was to deepen my knowledge of Basque cuisine and improve my skills in cooking it properly. I’ve admired it’s blend of tradition, technique, and regional pride for years, but respect from a distance feels insufficient. In addition to cooking Japanese food (more specifically, Washoku), I cross-train in and want to master Comida Vasca. Slowly, yes, but seriously.
The appeal of Basque cuisine runs deep. It’s not just the Marmitako (fish stew) or the pintxos or the Chuletón (i.e., fire-grilled meats). It’s the variety of flavors, the regional variation, and, in my estimation, once you can cook Basque food, you can almost master any other. It’s how a dish can be both simple and impossibly technical, how a cider house dinner can feel like both a celebration and a history lesson.
Like my experience in Bilbao two summers ago, to immerse myself, I enrolled in a week-long Spanish class. I’ve managed for years with broken Spanish, but it was time to move beyond survival mode. (Although Spanish isn’t the only language here. Euskera, the Basque language, is everywhere, from street signs to the hum of the market.)
Unfortunately, unlike my previous experience in 2023 when I took a week-long workshop at the Basque Culinary Center, it had closed for its summer break. (Welcome to August in Europe).
And like hell was I going to do one or more cooking classes with tourists (typically young couples and families with bored teenagers) that last a couple of hours and focus on completing pre-prepared and basic dishes. Been there, done that.
At one point, I seriously considered doing a stage (an unpaid internship) at a local Basque restaurant. But the idea of getting barked at in a foreign language (cuz I’m incredibly slow in food preparation and slightly deaf), while working on a book deadline (more about this later), gave me pause.
So I turned the limitation into a challenge: learn as much as possible independently, shop and eat with intention, visit the markets, the highly ranked restaurants and pintxo bars, speak to and observe the people who work there, and the ones who visit, ask for recommendations, and push beyond my culinary comfort zone. For example, when I go to the market, I watch what locals purchase. I ask them why they are buying particular types of food, and how they are preparing it. Also, understand that certain types of food are in season throughout the year. At the beginning of July, for example, fish like Bonito del Norte and Sardines are in season, and both are served simply grilled.
To the extent possible, my days were like a ritual. I went to the market and purchased what I would prepare for one of our meals, then ate lunch or dinner, sometimes alone or with my wife at local joints, using these situations to study breadth, technique, and ingredient combinations.
Since committing to this cross-training approach (a few years ago), I’ve become a relentless student. I’ve read cookbooks and articles, watched documentaries, taken notes, snapped photos, and pinned enjoyable and promising restaurants on Google Maps. Just like my practice with Washoku, I constantly try new recipes. These are typically dishes that I may have eaten somewhere but have never made. Part of this process involves trying to emulate the masters.
At a sidrería, I watched cider poured from enormous barrels, caught mid-air in tilted glasses, a technique that aerates the cider and connects drinkers to centuries of tradition. The ritualistic precision fascinated me: the angle of the pour, the timing, the way the server never looked at the glass but somehow never missed.
Instead of formal instruction, I’m building skills and knowledge through sustained observation, deliberate practice, and immersion in context. Like an athlete improving their ability through different exercises, I’m developing my Basque cooking technique through study, ingredient usage and substitution, cultural exploration, and repetition. This method requires patience. The ability to excel at cooking Basque food, or any other cuisine, improves through sustained attention, the willingness to understand why certain combinations of ingredients work, how regional variations affect the end product, and what makes a perfect txuleta or a properly balanced salsa verde.
I’m learning that mastery in any cuisine (or activity) demands more than fidelity to a recipe. It requires understanding the culture that created the food, the ingredients that define it, and the techniques that are used. In the Basque Country, that means respecting both tradition and innovation, precision, intuition, and improvisation.
Curiosity, consistency, and humility are also important. That’s how I’m moving forward, one dish at a time.
Photo credit
Title: txerri txuleta (similar to a pork chuleta)
from https://www.instagram.com/adventuresinbasquecooking/
Photographer: Jeffrey Ian Ross, Ph.D.
How a Global Prison Education Database Could Improve Rehabilitation Outcomes
/by Jeffrey Ian RossGovernments and private foundations spend considerable resources each year on prison education (i.e., courses in literacy, vocational skills, and higher education), believing they reduce recidivism and improve reentry success.
But outcomes vary widely. Some programs transform lives; others barely make a difference. The problem? We have little reliable evidence on which work, which fails, and why.
Small sample sizes, inconsistent metrics, and a narrow focus on single programs, facilities, or countries hinder most of this research.
The result is a patchwork of findings that offer little practical guidance for shaping policy or directing funding.
We can change that. A global database of correctional education programs and their outcomes would allow us to better compare results among programs and across borders, identify the most effective models, and adapt them to local contexts, while ending investments in approaches that don’t deliver.
It doesn’t require a billion-dollar grant. We could start small by crowdsourcing data from researchers, NGOs, and practitioners who are already tracking results. Over time, governments, international bodies, and foundations could fund and maintain the platform.
Right now, we build most correctional educational programs on hope and anecdote. With shared knowledge, we could ensure that our investments deliver measurable impact, maximizing education behind bars into one of the most powerful tools for rehabilitation the world has ever known.
Photo credit
Title: database
Photographer: Christophe Benoit
Thirty Years After VIOLENCE IN CANADA
/by Jeffrey Ian RossCanada is often portrayed, by Canadians and outsiders alike, as a peaceable kingdom. A safe, polite, largely nonviolent country. Aside from a handful of gritty television series that have made their way out of Canada, the True North is generally depicted as an exceptional place to live, work, or vacation.
But thirty years ago, I set out to challenge one of those myths. At the time, I was living outside of Canada, in the United States, and I was struck by how pervasive the news coverage of violence was, and the adaptations people made as a response. I began to wonder: Why do Canadians behave as if they’re immune to the same dynamics? There’s plenty of violence in Canada, too.
That question became the seed for Violence in Canada: Sociopolitical Perspectives, a book I edited at the beginning of my academic career. Now, three decades later, it seems worth reflecting on the origins of the project, what it accomplished, and how the landscape has shifted since its publication.
What I Set Out to Do
At the time, I had several goals. Like many early-career academics, I was trying to build my academic street cred. But this wasn’t some cynical résumé-padding exercise. Violence in Canada was also a personal homage to my primary mentor, Ted Robert Gurr, who had co-edited the classic Violence in America with Hugh Graham. That book lasted through three editions, each expanding and evolving with new material. Gurr and Graham’s Violence in America didn’t just map patterns; it helped shape scholarly and national conversations about crime, protest, and power. I hoped Violence in Canada could do something similar. Gurr, graciously, agreed to write the foreword to Violence in Canada.
I also saw the book as a necessary intervention. The popular image of Canada as a haven from violence, not just physical violence, but structural and state violence, struck me as dangerously incomplete and disengenuous. I wanted to compile a volume that would push back against that complacency.
Building the Book
All books begin as a proposal, and Violence in Canada was no different. I shopped the idea around and received the most promising feedback from Oxford University Press Canada. I also invited academics whose work I respected to contribute chapters. Although I had a lot of energy, I was still ABD (all but dissertation) at the time, which probably didn’t help. I’m sure some contributors wondered who the hell I was. Nevertheless, I was truly blessed by having so many respected scholars who specialized in facets of violence in Canada agree to write chapters for the book.
In retrospect, I might advise early-career scholars to wait until after finishing their dissertations before writing a book or editing a volume. But what did I know? I was impatient and, as it turns out, fortunate.
Violence in Canada, and another project I was working on at the same time, Controlling State Crime, formed the foundation of my early publishing experience. Editing Violence in Canada taught me a lot about how edited scholarly books come together, and later, I would reflect on that process in a newsletter article and two peer-reviewed pieces.
Reception and Legacy
Originally published by Oxford, the book had a solid run. It received mostly positive reviews, was relatively well cited, and eventually went into a second edition.
Still, it wasn’t without criticism. Some activists argued that the book failed to address structural violence, a critique that I think would’ve been answered more clearly had they read both Gurr’s and my forewords. But the feedback was instructive, and I don’t dismiss it. Structural violence in Canada deserved more sustained engagement then, and it certainly does now.
One of the central arguments of the book was that much of the violence in Canada happens out of sight behind closed doors. And since the book’s publication, research has continued to validate that claim. Peer-reviewed articles, government reports, and NGO investigations have all helped uncover the less visible but deeply embedded patterns of violence in Canadian life.
Canada Today
In the three decades since the book’s release, the level of violence in Canada has fluctuated, much like in the United States. But overall, Canada still experiences less violence per capita. This isn’t accidental.
A combination of factors—stricter gun control laws, lower levels of poverty and inequality, and universal healthcare (including mental health services), have all played a role. That doesn’t mean we’re anywhere close to utopia. Ask a First Nations woman living on or near a reservation, or a street cop patrolling the inner city of Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal, whether Canada is nonviolent. They’ll either laugh at you or stare at you in disbelief.
The myth of the peaceable kingdom isn’t dead and may never die.
But treating Canada as immune to the forces that produce violence elsewhere is more than naïve. It’s dangerous.
Looking Ahead
Violence in Canada was never intended to be the final word. It was a starting point, a provocation, and an attempt to push the conversation forward. Thirty years later, the book feels both dated and oddly prescient. Much has changed in terms of policies, practices, and laws, but arguably not enough.
Violence in Canada as a process didn’t begin with colonization, and it didn’t end with a book (even one that made its way into a second edition). The challenge remains: to ask hard questions about who gets hurt, how, and why, and to confront the myths some people cling to in the name of national exceptionalism.