Wins, losses, and some learning experiences
Artifact 1: An Assignment I Enjoyed
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Honors 392 has been a very interesting addition to my academic scope. This class has sparked my interest in the science and engineering side of social issues, and made me wonder how my interest in policy can impact these issues. In addition to social justice, I am now interested in the 'objective' world of STEM.
Assignment
Week 1 Reflection Honors 392
In the readings The New Theory of the Aggressive Egg that Attracts Sperm and The Rise of the Racist Robots, the concept of underlying discrimination leading to larger impacts on societal beliefs and perpetuation of institutionalized racism/sexism are proven in two very different fields of STEM. First, The New Theory of the Aggressive Egg that Attracts Sperm ponders the idea that the wording used to describe the process of egg fertilization promotes cultural beliefs of female subordination and male dominance through depicting the egg as a dormant, inferior part of fertilization in comparison to the sperm. There are great consequences that come with this use of outdated cultural belief in factual research. Using engrained discriminatory belief in a field based on science, not humanities, has the possibility of stalling research when findings do not adhere to the cultural emphasis on a superior man and inferior female, or the analysis of these findings may incorrectly phrase a process so that their cultural beliefs are represented. Not only can this wording change the findings of the field, but it can also perpetuate long outdated and sexist thinking onto the world. By setting the female up as a damsel, sitting there waiting for a male to act upon her, the biology field is helping portray women in that way. This may sound slightly over dramatic, but the narrative of our country already puts women in a position of inferiority and in order for that to change, the concept of female subordination must be completely eradicated from any teaching, whether it be in a history, English, or biology book. All women learning about these topics (like me), subconsciously create a negative image about the structure and processes of the female body, creating the male experience to feel ideal in comparison. This leads to self-loathing and conforming to inferiority because that is what we as women learn is correct through teachings like these. Furthermore, the idea that when the egg is given an active role in the process, it is then depicted as ‘trapping’ the sperm, and consequently the ‘bad guy’ in the process, adheres with the idea that when a woman takes control of a situation, she is considered bossy, whereas a man is considered determined. Again, the negatively connotative language could result in women being afraid to take control in fear of looking over controlling. These consequences are obviously very large scale and not due to scientific wording on the fertilization process but are nonetheless reflected in the culture of America and many other countries. Moving on from the first article, the same idea of engrained discrimination being perpetuated seemingly unintentionally is discussed in the article The Rise of the Racist Robots. This article speaks on the tendency for the criminal justice system to racially profile and disproportionally incarcerate people of color, which then teaches their computer systems to profile people of color as more likely to be arrested. This is another example of how the systemic oppression in our culture bleeds into modern ways of life to perpetuate out-of-date ideals. The consequence of these systems, much like the consequence of the wording in the previous article, is the perpetuation of ideas that we as a society are trying to change. Supporting the idea that people of color will be arrested more, subsequently promotes the idea that people of color are inherently bad. This helps keep the cycle of poverty, lower rates of high school graduation and college attendance, eventually leading to higher rates of crime and incarceration. This article also emphasizes the possible impact on the science and engineering community, which could suffer if the tools being produced are projecting a negative image on the industry because of the inherent bias that changes the outcome of data sets. This may slow the advancement of artificial intelligence and other technology, therefore hurting the engineering field and the progress it is making. The one assumption made by both articles is that people are easily swayed by the wording in a scientific journal or what a robot says. These assumptions have merit and evidence, but it is possible that people are not so easily swayed by subliminal messages in academic works.
Artifact 2: A Grade I Was Disappointed With
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Receiving an 80% on my first college midterm taught me the importance of the readings. Although I did read all of the assigned material, I did not study it super closely for the test, which I now know to do. Now for tests in this class I have flashcards of the main points, goals, findings, and evidence from each reading. Using this study method helped me get a 100% on the next midterm.
Artifact 3: An Assignment I Struggled With
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My first LSJ, on the topic of justice as depicted in Bryan Stevenson's 'Just Mercy', essay was a huge struggle for me. I stressed out about the essay and was never sure if I was doing it correctly. Although it was challenging, I was very interested in the topic and glad that 'Just Mercy' was the book that I analyzed for my first college paper. This assignment also taught me to use my resources and try to find time to go to a writing center or talk to a TA so you're not unsure about what you're doing like I was.
Brokenness and Mercy
“The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent--strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration” (Stevenson: 294).
The US justice system is based on the principles of punishment and retribution. In many cases, the humanity and vulnerability of the accused is ignored in replacement of individual blame. These oppressive models of criminal justice placate society into acceptance of abuse and oppression, rather than encouraging rehabilitation. This system has the ability to reverse oppression through the use of mercy in sentencing and within the systems of incarceration. In Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson critiques the brokenness of the criminal justice system and its actors for their violence and dehumanization of marginalized people through emphasis on individual culpability. He proposes a system of reform that utilizes merciful judgment for those who seem the least deserving, requiring acknowledgment of universal brokenness and the implementation of mercy.
Stevenson criticizes the current retributive justice system as it incites cyclical violence and dehumanizes marginalized people. Our current justice system emphasizes proportionate punishment and incapacitation for crimes committed. This system often fails the most vulnerable as there is violence and neglect at every level of this process: from sentencing, to prison conditions, to re-entry. This structural violence- social arrangements embedded in our political and legal systems that put individuals in harm's way and inhibit them from meeting their basic needs- victimizes the perpetrators of crime as prisoners can expect inhumane environments, insufficient health care, and lack of adequate legal assistance. In retributive sentencing, life histories and structural inequalities are often simplified or ignored by actors of the criminal justice system, resulting in harsh and apathetic sentences. Actors often justify this cruelty by deferring all blame to the individual, intentionally ignoring the vulnerability and brokenness of the people that they engage with. In prison, the very violence that the system is meant to prevent is perpetuated and magnified by those in power and by fellow prisoners. Stevenson exemplifies this cycle through Avery Jenkins, a disabled young man of color that was sentenced to death after murdering someone during a psychotic episode. Jenkins had a devastating life story full of abuse, abandonment, and life traumas yet neither his mental illness nor his traumatic past was considered in his sentencing. Once in prison, little attention was paid to his mental health treatment and punishment was inflicted for failing to adhere to militaristic rules (Stevenson: 197).
Beyond this structural violence, prison environments are rife with individual direct violence. The guards often abuse power and prisoners abuse semblances of power to control and incite fear in other prisoners. Direct, visible, violence is often observed as rape and assault, forms of domination and subordination rooted in brokenness and anger. This threat of violence within the prison walls contributes to emotional withdrawal, dependence on the prison structures, and implementation of informal prison culture (violence) into life outside of prison (Haney 2002). This abuse is exemplified by Stevenson through Trina Garrett, a homeless teenage girl convicted of murder after accidentally setting a friend’s house on fire and killing two people after breaking and entering. She came from a childhood full of domestic violence and sexual assault, which continued in prison where she was raped by a guard, gave birth to his child, and developed multiple sclerosis and mental health issues while incarcerated. Trina exemplifies the horrific result of the physical and psychological torture sustained by the mass incarceration system (Stevenson: Chapter 8).
This dehumanization creates societal acceptance of a prison system that neglects prisoners and perpetuates the violence that is supposed to be deterred by the criminal justice system. Once out of prison, the cycle of violence continues and ripples through communities, where victims become perpetrators and perpetrators become victims. Communities support structural violence, creating cultural violence- the legitimation of structural violence through ideology of culture- against marginalized groups. This argument on cyclical structural and cultural violence is supported by a case study of forty ex-prisoners and their life histories, exemplifying the direct link between poverty, prison, and violence through stories of domestic violence and community violence taking part in violent actions leading to incarceration (Western 2015). Our criminal justice system is overwhelmingly focused on individual culpability and blameworthiness, which lulls society into acceptance of the broken systems that incarcerate people (Haney 1997). It also enables folks to ignore the societal responsibilities and inequalities that resulted in crime. These societal circumstances that create violence are not considered, leaving an image of a violent monster to the public, which allows these systems of violence to be perpetuated. Throughout every step of this process, individuals are dehumanized and reduced to the single act that committed them. In this way, people are not considered products of broken pasts but are violent, deviant monsters that deserve to be locked away. Avery Jenkins was not a traumatized, mentally ill man, but a murderer. Trina Garrett was not a frightened, homeless teen, but an arsonist. The notion of individual responsibility and simplification of complicated social issues justifies the dehumanization of incarcerated people.
Individualization and blameworthiness also enable society to ignore the obvious disproportionalities in the Criminal Justice System and individual experience of violence. Poor communities, communities of color, young people, and the mentally ill are incarcerated at highly disproportionate rates: one in three black men can expect to go to jail in their lifetime, a quarter of a million children have been sent to prison, and there has been a 640 percent increase in female incarceration in the last 30 years (Stevenson: Introduction Chapter). This structural violence perpetuates the cyclical criminalization of people of color as well as poor people, this can be seen in the case of Walter McMillan, a poor man of color defended by Stevenson that was arrested on the premise that there was no one else to arrest, blamed for a murder that he did not commit, largely due to the public anger he caused by his infatuation with a white woman as a black man. He was subjected to life on death row, causing mental illness later on in his life, and shunning from his community. McMillan, Longworth, Jenkins, and many others exemplify the criminal justice systems tendency to protect the privileged and target the marginalized, leaving no mercy for those who need it most. This is seen in the pieces by Haney, Western, and Stevenson, which all link structural violence to marginalization by the systems of the law. These examples were of children, the most vulnerable and underdeveloped group that is incarcerated (Stevenson: 268). There is an undeniable link between poverty, race, and criminalization that helps maintains this (in)justice system.
The system of justice Stevenson proposes acknowledges universal brokenness and prioritizes mercy: “there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy” (Stevenson: 290). The societal acceptance of abuse in prison calls for individuals to change their perspective and actions surrounding marginalized groups and implement ‘just mercy’, mercy belonging to the undeserving, into systems of punishment. To achieve this end, he emphasizes that life histories, cultural, and structural violence’s must be considered in the system of punishment. The implementation of mercy rejects the existence of vengeance and neglect. He proposes that when mercy is unexpected and considered to be least deserved, it is most effective. This is particularly true for the dehumanized, demonized individuals in our criminal justice system. Stevenson claims that mercy has enough potency to mend the broken system and the broken people by abandoning victimization and healing the pain caused by mass incarceration. Just mercy stops the violence that justice systems are seeking to halt. The simple change from anger to empathy, from blame to understanding, and from victimization to rehabilitation, will change a system that has been broken since it started. The vision of mercy proposed by Stevenson relies on our understanding that “we all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent” and that universal brokenness “is also the source of our shared humanity” (Stevenson: 289). Should we accept that we are all broken, and one group is not better than the other because of how visible their brokenness is, our system will create less pain and suffering, because we will be looking for solutions to the problems that these societal beliefs have caused (Stevenson: 293-294). This is contingent upon societal capability to use mercy rather than fear and anger to create punishment. The structural violence’s of the criminal justice system are reified and reconstructed by individual violence’s. From sentencing to abuse within prisons, there is discretion, or personal decisions, made by legal actors that determine the fate of human beings. The current issue with the width of discretion allowed is that it perpetuates culturally oppressive norms that support a power hierarchy and systems of racial-capital oppression. This allows one broken person to decide the fate of another. This social construction of the system is a source of both fear and hope. Currently, people would rather blame this violence on lack of character than pain and suffering, because being broken is unacceptable. Stevenson proposes that using individualized mercy in the system can transform current conceptions of justice. This is why individual mercy is necessary. Should it become normal to be merciful, rather than punitive, the incarceration system will be able to avoid issues of cyclical cultural violence and structural violence. This requires significant changes in the relationships between victims and perpetrators, between criminals and state employees, and between individuals and their communities. Victims would need to be willing to reconcile with offenders which would off-put the entire system of isolation and retribution that is used in criminal justice. Structural changes in prisons would be necessary, as well as laws concerning treatment of prisoners and steps used in incarceration. We need to acknowledge the problems of these systems before we can fix them. This may be made difficult due to issues in defining class, ability, competency, and culpability; all of which being important factors in acknowledging the humanity of an individual. While the change toward mercy over individualized culpability would create a system that punishes humans rather than case files, it is not certain that society contains the mercy and empathy needed to facilitate these changes.
Stevenson critiques the system of punishment that perpetuates societal violence through the abuse of the incarcerated and the targeting of the marginalized. He proposes replacing this justice system with one that shows mercy to the condemned and accounts for the universal brokenness that has been ingrained into justice institutions. The vision of justice proposed by Stevenson would discourage societal apathy for the condemned and integrate mercy into punishment. Through this system of humanity, we will begin to mend what is broken.
Works Cited
Haney, Craig. “The Psychological Impact of Incarceration: Implications for Post-Prison
Adjustment.” US Department of Health and Human Services. 2002.
Haney, Craig, "Psychological Secrecy and the Death Penalty: Observations on "The Mere
Extinguishment of Life"". Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 16. 1997.
Longworth, Arthur. “How to Kill Someone.” Monroe Correctional Facility, Monroe, Washington.
Stevenson, Bryan, Just Mercy: a Story of Justice and Redemption. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2014. Print.
Western, Bruce. “Lifetimes of Violence in a Sample of Released Prisoners.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015.