So, I'm writing this on Friday, after several hours of binge-watching the fourth season of Orange is the New Black, and so I'm going to write about the prison system. I know, right? Sounds fun!
Now, I am in no way an expert on our criminal justice system (I did take intro to criminal justice in freshman year though, so I'm pretty close). I'm sure there is any number of more qualified, informed people that could talk about this subject intelligently and with valuable evidence to support their arguments. However, I'm a writer with a forum on the internet, so I may as well insert my uneducated opinion into the mix!
My opinions are extremely worthy of your time.
To start off, I think that we can all agree that the criminal justice system as a whole has quite the selection of flaws. Whether or not we agree on which flaws are important to address or how those flaws should be addressed, the fact that it's all a mess seems like an indisputable truth, and a great starting point for us.
So, why is it all a mess? Well, tons of reasons actually! From corruption to systemic marginalization to all those undercover high school infiltration missions, there are far too many different facets of the problem to focus on in my short article. Most of these require some serious research and a working knowledge of a ton of real issues, which is a bit above my zero dollar pay-grade (leave the journalism to people with actual jobs!). So instead, I want to write about the mentality of criminal justice, not just for those operating the system or for those at its mercy, but for us schlubs on the outside, whose only knowledge of criminal justice comes from that one time you got pulled over for speeding even though you're pretty sure you weren't speeding.
20 miles over in a school-zone? How was I supposed to know?
See, the problem with criminal justice, going back about as far as its inception, is one of ideology. What is the purpose of criminal justice? Just the words "criminal justice" mean so many different things to so many different people. What is a criminal? What is justice? The problem with operating in a world of ideologies is finding the real-life definitions for your inadequate ideological semantics. Sure, it's nice to believe that "evil" is a real thing, but I like to believe we're all smart enough to recognize how meager a simple term is against the complexity of real, flesh-and-flawed people.
Going back across the long history of the criminal justice system, the working ideologies behind incarceration have varied greatly, anywhere from operating as a form of deterrence to serving as retaliatory punishment for offenders. Indeed, many of the more conservative approaches to justice come with a kind of natural logic; dangerous individuals should be kept away from us, and those who have hurt us deserve punishment. In your head, it might make perfect sense to treat criminals like a bad pest problem; ship off all those cockroaches and leave 'em dancing on Uranus (that's what exterminators do, right?).
Yeah, Earth is for decent, civilized cockroaches!
The problem is, we're in the 21st century now, and that means that we can't continue to pretend that prison and retribution are logical (much less humane) responses to the host of social and economic issues that tempt criminal behavior.
What's more, as a community of idiots tied together by the mutual discomfort of existence, you take many liberties in assuming that anyone else could be better or worse than yourself. Degrading your fellow human to the status of "criminal" is easy, but horribly insubstantial. Believe me, I know that you are always in the right and that your halo is sparkly clean, but just for a moment I want to ask you to look inside yourself and agree that you're a criminal too; we're all criminals. Hell, if you spend any time on the internet, you'll see that most of us are just a few dissenting opinions away from straight-up murder. And that's not a bad thing! Or, I mean, it definitely is and we're working really hard on fixing that, but in the meantime it's not so terrible.
My therapist says that this is progress.
The problem comes when we actually fall for our self-aggrandizing deception, when all that "at least I'm not a criminal" thinking starts to really bleed into your ego. At that point, dispensing "justice" can become worryingly easy. How quickly have you condemned the things you detest to pain, misery or death? How often have you wished angry punishment on another person? Your answers should scare you, not because your judgment isn't to be trusted (I'm sure you have all the right opinions and moral directions), but because you aren't in charge of the system. If you have any doubts about our government's decision making, not to mention your own, you should be terrified that capital punishment and the prison system exist as they do in our country.
The truth is, we are, all of us, just steps away from incarceration. Even if you think you have the whole "not getting arrested" thing under control, wrongful convictions happen all the time! So get off your high horse and look at the problem from the perspective of the would-be criminal you really are. Prison and retribution are both old solutions to problems that have yet to be solved. It's in your best interest to retire these concepts and change your philosophy on what "justice" really is, because there's no telling when you'll be the one rockin' that stylish jumpsuit.
Insert unobtrusive OITNB picture here.
Look, I know it's nice to feel like you have power over your demons. I know it feels nice to jump on board the outrage-mobile and start slinging death-threats at the latest Internet's-most-wanted villain. I know the ecstasy of being on the side of "justice". But please, whittle down your elevated indignation and recognize the behavior that got us here in the first place. Trying to suss out who is and isn't a parasitic tapeworm in our society is a lost cause; we are all the tapeworm, the Earth: our host. If we are going to keep pointing our fingers at the culpable, then it's high time we start to point them at ourselves for maintaining the same stupid social paradigms that have allowed for this cycle of crime and punishment to continue. Take a moment to argue your own understanding of "justice" and see where it takes you. What we have is an ideological issue here, and that's how we have to approach it. Either that, or let's all just agree that we're tapeworms and flush ourselves away.
