"JUSTICE" ?
Okay, so here are some of my thoughts that I have been wrestling with since going to county yesterday. And some questions have always been around me... I am supposed to submit this for class but I don't think it's very well structured but when you're asked to condense your opinions and emotions into a one-page response paper, it is harder to get extensive but to the point. I am just dipping my water in this stuff. Sorry if it lacks cohesion, it's late...
It is clear to me now that we exist within systems that have been designed or degraded into setting up, not just individuals, but whole communities, to fail. In visiting the Men's Central Jail and being able to see first-hand into a world that has been much forgotten about by most of society, I was confronted with the dismal reality of their situations. I considered what it meant for them to be in prison and how exactly did they end up there. Were there certain factors that might have been considered pre-dispositions? Are certain communities and "types" of people more likely to fail? I then thought about what their lives would be like if and when they came out of it. For all that happens within those concrete walls, will they be able to be reintegrated back into society? Does society even really give them a chance?
As I have said before, we are truly and deeply within a crisis. Yet, why are the sirens and lights not blaring in our faces? Why have we chosen to push these people out of our conscienceness? Urban communities are so often tossed aside as lost causes. Their socio-economic conditions thus become the determining factors of their human worth. And to add a rap sheet to their profiles, they end up losing their human worth. This became very apparent to me while we were in county. Their situations are so gray because of the few, if any, choices that are left for them once they have done time. "The Code of the Streets" describes the depressing state of these communities, "The inclination of violence springs from the circumstances of life among the ghetto poor - the lack of jobs... the stigma of race, the fallout from rampant drug use... and the resulting alienation and lack of hope for the future." The idea that poverty and abuse can be pre-dispositions to ultimate human demise has become a cyclical reality in the urban community. If we keep believing that South Central, Compton, Watts, etc. are places that will implode with crime and tragedy, I believe that such attitudes will really paint the truth. If you tell a child that they will never amount to anything and they are daily affirmed in violent images of desparity, the child will become nothing.
I also have been grappling with the concept of how human worth is determined. Is our identities as human beings actually measured by our mistakes and flaws? Once you become a criminal, can anyone really see you as more than that? Someone who is a criminal is usually considered to longer any worth to the community. If they are harming others, what good are they to society? Yet, how are we really supposed to treat them? Hope for Skid Row gets darker and smaller everyday. Who wants to deal with an entire sector of burn-outs and losers? In the same way that the homeless are often perceived as lazy and choosing to not help themselves get back on their feet, those who have served time in prison are also often seen as inferior or less than the rest of society because they made those choices and they have to deal with the circumstances. Since they ended up doing something that was wrong (for whatever reason), why should the rest of society have to be responsibile or even convicted (no pun intended) to feel compassion and forgiveness? But how then does that conflict with God's commandment to love one another? Are criminals exempt from this code? Can we truly be a community in this world while ignoring those that have been so afflicted?
The concept of criminal justice is also quite disturbing to settle with. For someone who has done something wrong, is long-term or infinite containment really the best option? To say, "You are bad. You need to be locked up. You do not deserve anything better", is just plain disturbing to me. We all know the detrimental effects of what imprisonment can do to someone, yet, it is somehow in the name of "justice" that we do this.
Again, this is why we are in a system that sets people up to fail. If, from day one - the day they were born into their particular environment or geographical location, they are already determined to not be able to succeed and worthy of a life like everyone else, how much more so is that attitude perpetuated when they have broken the law? That is the exact ammunition the government needs to keep things in check and allow gentrification to still be well on its way.
(To be continued...)