How are you today?
I want to reflect on a recent letter my grandfather sent me.
Enclosed in the envelope was a $40.00 check for a UC Berkeley sweater and a note, expressing well wishes and concern about my education.
He writes, "I know you have not chosen a major yet, but you must rememeber that a big part of getting an Education is not only what kind of a job you have but also the monetary benefits. [...] I know Berkeley is a liberal school and the thinking is of high ideals, but you must remember the reality of Life is that you have to earn a good salary at what profession you enter."
And the letter continues on and so forth with concern about my future. I personally feel that the gratification I get from my undergraduate degree at Berkeley is not contingent upon how much money I could potentially be making, but from what I do with it. I understand why he focues on the money--hes been grinding that into my head all my life. I distinctly remember when I was a child, I wanted to be an ice cream scooper, but he said that didn't make enough money. All I wanted was free ice cream.
This man spent his part of his youth fighting fascism abroad because he had to fight the racism he faced at home, and all he has to remember from that fight is his Purple Heart award...framed in his living room. I wonder, and am too scared to ask him, if he thinks the world has changed. In his last years, he sees the Neo-Conservative forces of America oppressing the powerless in the name of capitalist gain, thinly veiled as "freedom" and "progress". After a lifetime of living and experiencing institutionalized oppression, it may make sense to him if I went with the flow of the system, instead of trying to fighting it.
I wrote back, and let him know that I am majoring in Peace--literally. I want to change the structure that traps us within our institutionalized confinement and I want to transform violence into peace. I wonder if he thinks there is room for idealizers like me in the world, or if he thinks I'm going to be swallowed whole by my futile attempts at peace.............as Vaclav Havel said:
"For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?"
Have a good day :)
Luv, Aly
P.S. I finished my paper for PACS 100, and I feel like I have some good ideas for changing the world. :D
P.P.S. Econ 2 owned me.
P.P.P. S. <3
PACS 100: Peace Theory
5/3/06
Transforming and Re-Structurating the American Criminal Justice System
The American Criminal Justice System is our nation's form of socially controlling the deviants deemed to be "social junk" which are the individuals costly but harmless to society such as the mentally ill and drug addicts, and "social dynamite" which are the individuals costly and detrimental to society such as burglars, rapists and murderers. These individuals are criminals, and are consequently subjected to the processes of the criminal justice system. If convicted, the modern penal system assumes as its principal object the loss of wealth and/or rights through incarceration.When a crime of great severity has been committed, the criminal loses his or her right to life, and is subjected to the death penalty. Aside from the structural violence that occurs in the criminal justice system, individuals are subjected to direct violence within prisons as well. The violence of this system is twofold: firstly this reaction to criminal activity is dehumanizing as the individual is kept in confinement without the ability to make choices in life and ceases to be a member of society. Secondly, this violence is reproduced and perpetuated through a process of structuration. The human actions at the level of agency simultaneously structure, and are structured by society. In other words, human actions are done in the context of our socially structured culture, and the structure of our society is based and composed of these structurated actions. This is also why it is the entire system of American criminal justice that creates violence, not merely the process of incarceration.
Though this cycle appears to be closed and fixed, it is important to note that structures are never static, they move mechanically, cyclically and evolutionarily. There is potential to transform this violence within the criminal justice system and move towards peace. Violence is a system, thus change and peace must be thought of systematically. In this paper, I will first break down the existing structure and identify knowledge-power complexes which create contradictions within the criminal justice system that may serve as an incentive for new thinking and action. Then, I will detail how the new thinking and action can challenge the existing structure and contribute towards a transformative restructuring of the current system and move
Modernity and personal security are notions that provide authority and legitimacy to this pattern of power and interest. They are the underlying knowledge-power complexes of this structurated violence, and are what rationalizes the dehumanization that occurs within the prison system. Modernity can be defined as the "creation of new tools and techniques that aid in making production more efficient." This system of meaning fuels our society's desire to be the most economical, efficient, and technologically savvy as possible. Modernity of technology legitimizes the criminal justice system by providing justification for the disposal of entities that would not partake in or would hamper the progress of technological advancement. Social junk and social dynamite are deemed criminal or deviant because they are the most injurious types of people to our progression in modernity. Incarceration is the means with which our society removes these hindrances to progress.
Another knowledge-power complex that empowers the violence of the criminal justice system is that of personal security. There are two ways to interpret personal security, one way pertains to the actual well being of individuals within a community and the other pertains to an individual's ability to be secure within the panoptic web of modernity. The first interpretation of personal security rationalizes the violence within the criminal justice system in the name of protection against physical harm. The criminal justice system seeks out those individuals that comprise society's social junk and social dynamite and contains them. The concept of personal security does not only include protection from physical violence but also the protection of the individual's right to continue living a life free to pursue opportunities. In other words, the function of the criminal justice system is to remove obstacles that lie in the path of a person's right to progress in respect to modernity. The focus in society "is upon a safe and sterile enclave in which the unpleasantries of inner-city decay are not visible to the residents, consumers or office workers who fill them." The costly risk of having social junk or social dynamite in society is evaluated to be so detrimental to society's progress towards technological modernity that they must be incarcerated or sentenced to death.
Modernity and personal security are the driving knowledge-power complexes behind the perpetuation and structuration of violence within the criminal justice system. However, there are contradictions within these paradigms of meaning which may allow for the enabling of change. Heightened risk, unintended consequences, as well as rising costs and diminishing returns are all negative enablers in disrupting the knowledge-power complex. These three elements are negative enablers because they provide incentive for new thinking and action by escalating the intensity of the violence committed by the criminal justice system.
Heightened risk as a result of incarceration is a contradiction within the criminal justice system. Incarceration subjects prisoners to a dog-eat-dog lifestyle. The deprivation of basic human needs existent in the state of imprisonment and the need to find substitute gratification are the forces that shape the world of the prison. What develops is a hierarchical structure within the prison, a symbolic and functioning system of power. Prisoners assimilate to the lifestyle of the jail through prisonization--a process where the individual become accustomed to the folkways, mores, customs and general culture of the penitentiary. When a prisoner is released, the individual is still accustomed to functioning under the culture and power structure of the prison system. When back in society, the violence and aggression used to establish the hierarchical culture of the prison is still going to be applied in a society that does not institutionally run that way.
An example of this is male prison rape. Heterosexual rape symbolizes the condition of women in American society more than any other act. Similarly, homosexual rape symbolizes the condition of men in America's prisons.
The most serious cost of prison rape to society is that it takes non-violent offenders and turns them into people with high potential for violence, full of rage and eager to take vengeance on the society which they hold responsible for their utter humiliation.
Prison rape is a form of violence in itself, but when it is translated from out of the context of the prisons, it leads to serious repercussions for the personal safety of the community. This type of dynamic may lead to the use of violence and aggression to establish power. The intentions of the criminal justice system is to contain those who pose a threat to personal security, however, incarceration actually leads to a heightened risk to personal security as the aggression and violence learned within the prison (like in male prison rape) translates to the outside world when they are released.
In addition to heightened risk, another contradiction in the systems of meaning is the unintended consequences from the criminal justice system. In an attempt to forward the progress of technological modernity and keep the security of individuals, the criminal justice system sets forth to contain those individuals who pose a threat to these aims. However, the contradiction lies in the fact that this system does not rehabilitate and correct individuals, but rather just reacts and contains. The criminal justice system disintegrates prisoners from society as they experience a loss of social ties, loss of property and loss of capacity to take care of business while in jail. Thus, when they are released from jail, these individuals are alone, handicapped and without resources. They have no means to survive in a modernity driven society. So, like a turnstile, the prisoners leave, and are then back in prison again. Since the intentions of the criminal justice system are to remove those people who are obstacles to progression or are threats to personal security, it is contradictory that the system is actually facilitating the cycling of these individuals back into society without targeting the actual problem of why they are there in the first place.
This leads to the third enabler of change in the criminal justice system: rising costs and diminishing returns. The criminal justice system does not rehabilitate or correct the individuals of social junk and social dynamite, but rather reacts to their behavior with incarceration. This means that when the individuals are released back into the society that they were disrupting, their behavior has not been changed for the better. Ultimately, the result is an increasingly larger group of people funneling back into the prisons at the rising cost of the community's personal welfare, at the cost of efficient progress in technological modernity, and at the expense of these criminal's human dignity. The temporary achievement of imprisoning individuals is outweighed by the increasingly harmful costs of imprisonment.
Heightened risk, unintended consequences, and rising costs and diminishing returns are three contradictions that disrupt the knowledge-power complexes of modernity and personal security. These contradictions can enable transformative change as they bring an incentive for new thinking and action. The idea that the very system that is supposed to be protecting individuals and fostering progression in technological modernity, is actually endangering people and putting a cap on the potential possibilities of society by imprisoning.
These three enablers create a space for new thinking and action. What has been established is that the contradictions within the current criminal justice system actually make it an inefficient system at the expense of individuals' rights to liberty and choice. The current way of thinking can be characterized as "practical discourse" or a knowledge about actions but seldom formulated explicitly. The actions that result from this type of discourse are usually perfunctory ones--things that are done every day in routine. The new thinking that must be employed is that of "discursive discourse" where an explanation for an action is explicitly expressed. More specifically, the discourse that will resist violence and pursue peace is Cosmopolitanism.
The notion of social junk and social dynamite is inherently adversarial; one must have a definition of what the norm is in order to have a definition of what a hindrance to that norm is. The new thinking opposes that adversarial definition. Cosmoplitanism has several components to its definition: 1) ultimate priority is the welfare of the individual, 2) peoples are free and equal, and 3) people have a right to their own cultures so long as it does not intervene in the expression of other cultures. Thinking of all individuals as equals in moral worth is a starting point to breaking this cycle of violence. From that starting point, the contradictions within the current criminal justice system (heightened risk, unintended consequences, and rising costs and diminishing returns) become more clear, and dialog for reform is possible.
One empirical example is the Prison Radio project of the Redwood Justice Fund. The RJF believes in cosmopolitanism and that individuals in prison should not be forgotten and left to deteriorate; this NGO promotes the human rights of prisoners. The outlook of RJF can be summarized by Kandaswamy:
Human rights can be the basis of a community where difference is appreciated and recognized...we must first recognize that a community cannot be inclusive without accepting the existence of conflicting differences. Therefore, rather than tryig to suppress conflicts over difference, people need to confront difference and from it build a society which is both "fluid and dynamic" in its ability to address and resolve conflict. Such a society would be based on mutual respect for the dignity of all persons and should be grounded in the context of human rights"
The project challenges mass incarceration by "airing the voices of men and women in prison by bringing their voices into the public dialogue on crime and punishment." By allowing male and female prisoners read essays or speak their mind on the radio, the RJF is promoting cosmopolitan discourse and is enabling a change or shift towards peace.
Firstly, Prison Radio is challenging the current state of the criminal justice system and the systems of meaning that back it. The perspective that Prison Radio is working from is that people considered to be social junk or social dynamite are not hindrances or burdens, but rather victims of a system that institutionalizes poverty and crime. By giving people a public voice, Prison Radio already is transforming the role of criminals by rehumanizing them. In this sense, Prison Radio is helping shift public opinion toward a more humane view of prisoners.
Secondly, Prison Radio helps spur public motivation to look at core-system issues that create crime and poverty. Giving prisoners the opportunity to voice themselves over the radio reveals to the public their side of the story, as well as the crime and poverty that put them there in the first place. This not only reinforces the first goal of the Prison Radio, which is to humanize prisoners, but also gives the public and understanding of what situation and causes put them their in the first place. This begins to transform the structuration of the violence within the criminal justice system as the public becomes more aware of the deeper issues that lie beneath the social deviance.
Thirdly, Prison Radio illustrates what it is truly like within the prison system. Prisoners are finally able to reveal the underbelly of the criminal justice system, and its dehumanizing nature. This is transformative because revealing the violence and aggression in the prisons will motivate people to think differently about the prison system. Hearing what it is truly like to live in the prisons and how that affects prisoners may motivate people to change the way they view the prison system.
These three goals of the Prison Radio embody the belief of cosmopolitanism and promote the transformation of violence. The most effective part of the Prison Radio is that it works at changing the way the public sees the criminal, the reason why that person is considered a criminal, and why the criminal justice system is not effective in dealing with criminals. Every process of the criminal justice system can be critiqued from the voices of those who are actually experiencing the process, and that is very powerful.
The American criminal justice system today is an institutionalized violence on the socially worthless and the socially harmful. In the name of technological modernity and personal security, our society finds an excuse to take away peoples' rights and incarcerate them, subject them to direct violence within the system, and then take away or severely limit their ability to amalgamate back into society once they are released. However, several contradictions --heightened risk, unintended consequences and rising costs to diminishing returns--that arise from the criminal justice system open up the possibilities for creating space for new thinking and action. One group took the opportunity to do so, the Prison Radio project. By allowing male and female prisoners to voice themselves over the radio to the public, Prison Radio is not only rehumanizing prisoners by giving them rights to contact the outside world, but are also revealing the underlying causes of these people's imprisonment as well as exposing the true inner workings of the prison itself. This enables transformation because people are able to see prisoners and the system they are subjected to in a different light.
The micro-transformative activities of Prison Radio on the level of agency makes room for change on the macro level of structure. People who listen in on the radio can begin to realize the very contradictions of the criminal justice system and enablers on the structural level. It is possible for people to begin to question the validity of these knowledge-power systems that are responsible for the dehumanization of criminals in the criminal justice system. Once people are willing to question the ideas of technological modernity and personal security, that is when the de-structuration of the knowledge-power-violence system begins. Creating a transformative re-structuration of the dynamic of the knowledge-power complex is now possible. The re-structuration comes from the newly defined system of meaning, Cosmopolitanism. This shifts the dynamic away from modernity and personal security as the priority to human welfare.
Structuration reproduces and perpetuates the violence of the criminal justice system, however, structures can be enabling as well as constraining. It is possible to transform the system that causes so much violence. In the case of the criminal justice system, the Prison Radio functions as a transformative agent in beginning to deconstruct and reconstruct the structuration of violence. By no means is the Prison Radio a solution alone, it is merely an facilitator of change. If there is open society and discursive reflexivity, it is possible that this agent, and many others like it can create peace.
Enclosed in the envelope was a $40.00 check for a UC Berkeley sweater and a note, expressing well wishes and concern about my education.
He writes, "I know you have not chosen a major yet, but you must rememeber that a big part of getting an Education is not only what kind of a job you have but also the monetary benefits. [...] I know Berkeley is a liberal school and the thinking is of high ideals, but you must remember the reality of Life is that you have to earn a good salary at what profession you enter."
And the letter continues on and so forth with concern about my future. I personally feel that the gratification I get from my undergraduate degree at Berkeley is not contingent upon how much money I could potentially be making, but from what I do with it. I understand why he focues on the money--hes been grinding that into my head all my life. I distinctly remember when I was a child, I wanted to be an ice cream scooper, but he said that didn't make enough money. All I wanted was free ice cream.
This man spent his part of his youth fighting fascism abroad because he had to fight the racism he faced at home, and all he has to remember from that fight is his Purple Heart award...framed in his living room. I wonder, and am too scared to ask him, if he thinks the world has changed. In his last years, he sees the Neo-Conservative forces of America oppressing the powerless in the name of capitalist gain, thinly veiled as "freedom" and "progress". After a lifetime of living and experiencing institutionalized oppression, it may make sense to him if I went with the flow of the system, instead of trying to fighting it.
I wrote back, and let him know that I am majoring in Peace--literally. I want to change the structure that traps us within our institutionalized confinement and I want to transform violence into peace. I wonder if he thinks there is room for idealizers like me in the world, or if he thinks I'm going to be swallowed whole by my futile attempts at peace.............as Vaclav Havel said:
"For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it?"
Have a good day :)
Luv, Aly
P.S. I finished my paper for PACS 100, and I feel like I have some good ideas for changing the world. :D
P.P.S. Econ 2 owned me.
P.P.P. S. <3
PACS 100: Peace Theory
5/3/06
Transforming and Re-Structurating the American Criminal Justice System
The American Criminal Justice System is our nation's form of socially controlling the deviants deemed to be "social junk" which are the individuals costly but harmless to society such as the mentally ill and drug addicts, and "social dynamite" which are the individuals costly and detrimental to society such as burglars, rapists and murderers. These individuals are criminals, and are consequently subjected to the processes of the criminal justice system. If convicted, the modern penal system assumes as its principal object the loss of wealth and/or rights through incarceration.When a crime of great severity has been committed, the criminal loses his or her right to life, and is subjected to the death penalty. Aside from the structural violence that occurs in the criminal justice system, individuals are subjected to direct violence within prisons as well. The violence of this system is twofold: firstly this reaction to criminal activity is dehumanizing as the individual is kept in confinement without the ability to make choices in life and ceases to be a member of society. Secondly, this violence is reproduced and perpetuated through a process of structuration. The human actions at the level of agency simultaneously structure, and are structured by society. In other words, human actions are done in the context of our socially structured culture, and the structure of our society is based and composed of these structurated actions. This is also why it is the entire system of American criminal justice that creates violence, not merely the process of incarceration.
Though this cycle appears to be closed and fixed, it is important to note that structures are never static, they move mechanically, cyclically and evolutionarily. There is potential to transform this violence within the criminal justice system and move towards peace. Violence is a system, thus change and peace must be thought of systematically. In this paper, I will first break down the existing structure and identify knowledge-power complexes which create contradictions within the criminal justice system that may serve as an incentive for new thinking and action. Then, I will detail how the new thinking and action can challenge the existing structure and contribute towards a transformative restructuring of the current system and move
Modernity and personal security are notions that provide authority and legitimacy to this pattern of power and interest. They are the underlying knowledge-power complexes of this structurated violence, and are what rationalizes the dehumanization that occurs within the prison system. Modernity can be defined as the "creation of new tools and techniques that aid in making production more efficient." This system of meaning fuels our society's desire to be the most economical, efficient, and technologically savvy as possible. Modernity of technology legitimizes the criminal justice system by providing justification for the disposal of entities that would not partake in or would hamper the progress of technological advancement. Social junk and social dynamite are deemed criminal or deviant because they are the most injurious types of people to our progression in modernity. Incarceration is the means with which our society removes these hindrances to progress.
Another knowledge-power complex that empowers the violence of the criminal justice system is that of personal security. There are two ways to interpret personal security, one way pertains to the actual well being of individuals within a community and the other pertains to an individual's ability to be secure within the panoptic web of modernity. The first interpretation of personal security rationalizes the violence within the criminal justice system in the name of protection against physical harm. The criminal justice system seeks out those individuals that comprise society's social junk and social dynamite and contains them. The concept of personal security does not only include protection from physical violence but also the protection of the individual's right to continue living a life free to pursue opportunities. In other words, the function of the criminal justice system is to remove obstacles that lie in the path of a person's right to progress in respect to modernity. The focus in society "is upon a safe and sterile enclave in which the unpleasantries of inner-city decay are not visible to the residents, consumers or office workers who fill them." The costly risk of having social junk or social dynamite in society is evaluated to be so detrimental to society's progress towards technological modernity that they must be incarcerated or sentenced to death.
Modernity and personal security are the driving knowledge-power complexes behind the perpetuation and structuration of violence within the criminal justice system. However, there are contradictions within these paradigms of meaning which may allow for the enabling of change. Heightened risk, unintended consequences, as well as rising costs and diminishing returns are all negative enablers in disrupting the knowledge-power complex. These three elements are negative enablers because they provide incentive for new thinking and action by escalating the intensity of the violence committed by the criminal justice system.
Heightened risk as a result of incarceration is a contradiction within the criminal justice system. Incarceration subjects prisoners to a dog-eat-dog lifestyle. The deprivation of basic human needs existent in the state of imprisonment and the need to find substitute gratification are the forces that shape the world of the prison. What develops is a hierarchical structure within the prison, a symbolic and functioning system of power. Prisoners assimilate to the lifestyle of the jail through prisonization--a process where the individual become accustomed to the folkways, mores, customs and general culture of the penitentiary. When a prisoner is released, the individual is still accustomed to functioning under the culture and power structure of the prison system. When back in society, the violence and aggression used to establish the hierarchical culture of the prison is still going to be applied in a society that does not institutionally run that way.
An example of this is male prison rape. Heterosexual rape symbolizes the condition of women in American society more than any other act. Similarly, homosexual rape symbolizes the condition of men in America's prisons.
The most serious cost of prison rape to society is that it takes non-violent offenders and turns them into people with high potential for violence, full of rage and eager to take vengeance on the society which they hold responsible for their utter humiliation.
Prison rape is a form of violence in itself, but when it is translated from out of the context of the prisons, it leads to serious repercussions for the personal safety of the community. This type of dynamic may lead to the use of violence and aggression to establish power. The intentions of the criminal justice system is to contain those who pose a threat to personal security, however, incarceration actually leads to a heightened risk to personal security as the aggression and violence learned within the prison (like in male prison rape) translates to the outside world when they are released.
In addition to heightened risk, another contradiction in the systems of meaning is the unintended consequences from the criminal justice system. In an attempt to forward the progress of technological modernity and keep the security of individuals, the criminal justice system sets forth to contain those individuals who pose a threat to these aims. However, the contradiction lies in the fact that this system does not rehabilitate and correct individuals, but rather just reacts and contains. The criminal justice system disintegrates prisoners from society as they experience a loss of social ties, loss of property and loss of capacity to take care of business while in jail. Thus, when they are released from jail, these individuals are alone, handicapped and without resources. They have no means to survive in a modernity driven society. So, like a turnstile, the prisoners leave, and are then back in prison again. Since the intentions of the criminal justice system are to remove those people who are obstacles to progression or are threats to personal security, it is contradictory that the system is actually facilitating the cycling of these individuals back into society without targeting the actual problem of why they are there in the first place.
This leads to the third enabler of change in the criminal justice system: rising costs and diminishing returns. The criminal justice system does not rehabilitate or correct the individuals of social junk and social dynamite, but rather reacts to their behavior with incarceration. This means that when the individuals are released back into the society that they were disrupting, their behavior has not been changed for the better. Ultimately, the result is an increasingly larger group of people funneling back into the prisons at the rising cost of the community's personal welfare, at the cost of efficient progress in technological modernity, and at the expense of these criminal's human dignity. The temporary achievement of imprisoning individuals is outweighed by the increasingly harmful costs of imprisonment.
Heightened risk, unintended consequences, and rising costs and diminishing returns are three contradictions that disrupt the knowledge-power complexes of modernity and personal security. These contradictions can enable transformative change as they bring an incentive for new thinking and action. The idea that the very system that is supposed to be protecting individuals and fostering progression in technological modernity, is actually endangering people and putting a cap on the potential possibilities of society by imprisoning.
These three enablers create a space for new thinking and action. What has been established is that the contradictions within the current criminal justice system actually make it an inefficient system at the expense of individuals' rights to liberty and choice. The current way of thinking can be characterized as "practical discourse" or a knowledge about actions but seldom formulated explicitly. The actions that result from this type of discourse are usually perfunctory ones--things that are done every day in routine. The new thinking that must be employed is that of "discursive discourse" where an explanation for an action is explicitly expressed. More specifically, the discourse that will resist violence and pursue peace is Cosmopolitanism.
The notion of social junk and social dynamite is inherently adversarial; one must have a definition of what the norm is in order to have a definition of what a hindrance to that norm is. The new thinking opposes that adversarial definition. Cosmoplitanism has several components to its definition: 1) ultimate priority is the welfare of the individual, 2) peoples are free and equal, and 3) people have a right to their own cultures so long as it does not intervene in the expression of other cultures. Thinking of all individuals as equals in moral worth is a starting point to breaking this cycle of violence. From that starting point, the contradictions within the current criminal justice system (heightened risk, unintended consequences, and rising costs and diminishing returns) become more clear, and dialog for reform is possible.
One empirical example is the Prison Radio project of the Redwood Justice Fund. The RJF believes in cosmopolitanism and that individuals in prison should not be forgotten and left to deteriorate; this NGO promotes the human rights of prisoners. The outlook of RJF can be summarized by Kandaswamy:
Human rights can be the basis of a community where difference is appreciated and recognized...we must first recognize that a community cannot be inclusive without accepting the existence of conflicting differences. Therefore, rather than tryig to suppress conflicts over difference, people need to confront difference and from it build a society which is both "fluid and dynamic" in its ability to address and resolve conflict. Such a society would be based on mutual respect for the dignity of all persons and should be grounded in the context of human rights"
The project challenges mass incarceration by "airing the voices of men and women in prison by bringing their voices into the public dialogue on crime and punishment." By allowing male and female prisoners read essays or speak their mind on the radio, the RJF is promoting cosmopolitan discourse and is enabling a change or shift towards peace.
Firstly, Prison Radio is challenging the current state of the criminal justice system and the systems of meaning that back it. The perspective that Prison Radio is working from is that people considered to be social junk or social dynamite are not hindrances or burdens, but rather victims of a system that institutionalizes poverty and crime. By giving people a public voice, Prison Radio already is transforming the role of criminals by rehumanizing them. In this sense, Prison Radio is helping shift public opinion toward a more humane view of prisoners.
Secondly, Prison Radio helps spur public motivation to look at core-system issues that create crime and poverty. Giving prisoners the opportunity to voice themselves over the radio reveals to the public their side of the story, as well as the crime and poverty that put them there in the first place. This not only reinforces the first goal of the Prison Radio, which is to humanize prisoners, but also gives the public and understanding of what situation and causes put them their in the first place. This begins to transform the structuration of the violence within the criminal justice system as the public becomes more aware of the deeper issues that lie beneath the social deviance.
Thirdly, Prison Radio illustrates what it is truly like within the prison system. Prisoners are finally able to reveal the underbelly of the criminal justice system, and its dehumanizing nature. This is transformative because revealing the violence and aggression in the prisons will motivate people to think differently about the prison system. Hearing what it is truly like to live in the prisons and how that affects prisoners may motivate people to change the way they view the prison system.
These three goals of the Prison Radio embody the belief of cosmopolitanism and promote the transformation of violence. The most effective part of the Prison Radio is that it works at changing the way the public sees the criminal, the reason why that person is considered a criminal, and why the criminal justice system is not effective in dealing with criminals. Every process of the criminal justice system can be critiqued from the voices of those who are actually experiencing the process, and that is very powerful.
The American criminal justice system today is an institutionalized violence on the socially worthless and the socially harmful. In the name of technological modernity and personal security, our society finds an excuse to take away peoples' rights and incarcerate them, subject them to direct violence within the system, and then take away or severely limit their ability to amalgamate back into society once they are released. However, several contradictions --heightened risk, unintended consequences and rising costs to diminishing returns--that arise from the criminal justice system open up the possibilities for creating space for new thinking and action. One group took the opportunity to do so, the Prison Radio project. By allowing male and female prisoners to voice themselves over the radio to the public, Prison Radio is not only rehumanizing prisoners by giving them rights to contact the outside world, but are also revealing the underlying causes of these people's imprisonment as well as exposing the true inner workings of the prison itself. This enables transformation because people are able to see prisoners and the system they are subjected to in a different light.
The micro-transformative activities of Prison Radio on the level of agency makes room for change on the macro level of structure. People who listen in on the radio can begin to realize the very contradictions of the criminal justice system and enablers on the structural level. It is possible for people to begin to question the validity of these knowledge-power systems that are responsible for the dehumanization of criminals in the criminal justice system. Once people are willing to question the ideas of technological modernity and personal security, that is when the de-structuration of the knowledge-power-violence system begins. Creating a transformative re-structuration of the dynamic of the knowledge-power complex is now possible. The re-structuration comes from the newly defined system of meaning, Cosmopolitanism. This shifts the dynamic away from modernity and personal security as the priority to human welfare.
Structuration reproduces and perpetuates the violence of the criminal justice system, however, structures can be enabling as well as constraining. It is possible to transform the system that causes so much violence. In the case of the criminal justice system, the Prison Radio functions as a transformative agent in beginning to deconstruct and reconstruct the structuration of violence. By no means is the Prison Radio a solution alone, it is merely an facilitator of change. If there is open society and discursive reflexivity, it is possible that this agent, and many others like it can create peace.