Tag: justice

Crooked Fool: Watching Adolescence through an Abolitionist Lens

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

I’m a sucker for a sad, heavy show, so when I saw the description for Netflix’s new mini-series Adolescence, I knew I was in for one helluva tear-filled binge watch.

Now, I want to note that this is not a review of the show. I thought it was extraordinarily well done from a creative standpoint and the actors killed it. If you want a sad story with some important stuff to say, it’s more than worth it.

But since being exposed to abolitionist thinking, I watch shows like this differently.  There are an abundance of shows depicting crime and punishment floating around. Art and life are caught up in a never-ending feedback loop with each other, so it makes sense. But it’s hard to watch something as heartbreaking as Adolescence and not call certain narratives into question.

The series opens with one trauma after another:  First thing in the morning, 13-year-old Jamie Miller is arrested from his bed. His family is shouted at to show their hands and get on the floor. Jamie is promptly taken away in a police car with little explanation given to his frantic parents. He is taken into custody, strip searched, and put in a cell. The strip searching scene in particular got me: nothing was shown, but the looks on the faces of everyone else in the room and the officer’s voice instructing him to show the most intimate parts of his body made me vaguely nauseous even from the safety of my living room. I appreciate honest art, but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

Jamie is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie. By the end of the first episode, we find out it’s true. He’s guilty. The crime is revealed to have occurred against a background of online bullying and incel culture, with Jamie having picked up misogynist ideals in the process.

Our justice system in the US is, of course, a bit different than in the UK where the series takes place, but many of the practices depicted ring true to the experiences of incarcerated folks here, as well. I remember one incarcerated woman I spoke to talking about how she’d seen a list of events that could traumatize a person, and how inmates are subjected to most of those things on a daily basis.

It’s impossible to imagine a 13-year-old boy ever being able to feel safe while incarcerated, and the fact is, incarceration is often not safe for those in custody. Whether it’s a strip search or constantly being snapped at by guards with deadly weapons, prison is not a safe place. It’s certainly not a place to reflect deeply on your actions and heal the wounds that contributed to them.

And that’s the thing about prisons: they don’t directly address harm. They punish wrongs against the state, and that’s not always the same thing.

Sending Jamie to prison won’t bring Katie back. Nor will it address the tremendous pain her family must be experiencing, or any trauma inflicted on the other kids at the school. When one of Katie’s friends gets into a physical fight with another student over his role in what happened to Katie, we see how trauma begets more trauma, possibly leading to the criminalization of yet another child. Incarceration cannot solve any of these things. Punishment as a philosophy cannot heal wounds caused by harm.

A long period of imprisonment for Jamie also fails to address the pain experienced by his own family. They had armed officers break down their door early in the morning and pull their son out of bed to take him away. They were bullied and shunned by their community for a crime that they were not directly responsible for. They have to mourn the loss of a son who, though still living, will likely never be a part of their daily lives in the same way again. Taking Jamie away punishes them, too.

Maybe it’s easier to accept harsh, punitive measures when it feels like justice. But if they fail to actually address the harm experienced by Katie or the community, and if they fail to help Jamie understand and take accountability for the harm he has caused, then what’s the purpose?

And here’s the kicker: the focus on punitive systems takes away Katie’s humanity, too. One of the few criticisms I’ve seen repeated about this series is how little we know about Katie by the end. The entire show focuses on Jamie and his looming punishment, and rather than being an oversight on the part of the show’s creators, this is a perfect reflection of how the system actually works. The tunnel vision on the act of punishing a wrong leaves no space for the person who was harmed in the first place. In the eyes of the criminal justice system, the fundamental issue is that Jamie broke the law, not that Jamie caused another person harm.

Punishing Jamie also fails to address the issue that led to him committing a crime in the first place. There is simply nothing that can fix a child losing their life, but do we not owe it to ourselves and our communities to minimize the risk of it happening again? Thing is, crime never happens in a vacuum. Jamie wasn’t magically born a murderer. One thing Adolescence does well is helping us to understand what could drive a child to hurt another child. Putting Jamie in jail will not take away the circumstances that created an environment where a crime like that could happen. Online bullying and kids getting radicalized on the internet are not solved by locking up a child.

Here’s another pill that may be hard to swallow: Jamie is not all bad. No human being is. The show has moments where we see his humanity clearly, like when he asks for his dad during intake. He has moments where he’s polite and even kind of sweet. None of that excuses what he did, but it reminds us that no life is made up of a single moment. If he could find healing and learn to understand the harm he caused, could the community not benefit from his good qualities? Would we rather throw a human being away for a mistake, even a massive one, and let all the bad be, or find what opportunities we can to bring good into the world?

I’ve done a lot of volunteer work in prisons and with folks who are formerly incarcerated. Some of them hurt other people. Some of them had life sentences. None of them have ever harmed me. All of them had good qualities. I typically feel very safe in their presence. People can change. Think of the biggest mistake you’ve ever made – what if that moment defined your entire life?

Here in Michigan, we’ve had rulings in recent years that have retroactively eliminated mandatory life without parole for folks who were minors at the time they committed their crime. We know that brains are not fully developed at that age and that trauma can impact behavior. Punishing people forever for mistakes they made as children is not justice.

At the end of Adolescence, Jamie tells his family he plans to plead guilty. In doing so, he certainly forfeits the rest of his childhood, and depending on the laws where he lives, possibly the rest of his life. But even in prison, life does go on. People keep breathing and, in spite of horrific circumstances, they often keep growing. At least here in Michigan, life sentences can, in rare instances, be commuted, and people can come home. I’ve met some of those people. All I can hope is that Jamie’s story will have that kind of miracle. That the ending will be at least as complicated as the crime that began this heartbreaking story, and maybe just a little less painful. That maybe there will be some second chance and he’ll be able to truly reckon with the fallout of his actions, rather than just stewing in them for the rest of his life without learning anything. That maybe he’ll be able to put good deeds into the world to balance out the bad. That maybe we didn’t take his humanity when he took Katie’s life. That maybe two lives don’t have to be lost and two families don’t have to bear that loss.

Right and wrong and harm and healing are not black and white. They are complex sets of actions taken by people who contain multitudes living under systems that harm. Human beings are not all good or bad, they are just whole, and that doesn’t make things easier. It makes them harder. The question we have to ask ourselves is what we are going to do when difficult, painful things happen. Are we going to address the problem, or are we just going to try and lock people up so we don’t have to look at it?

Crooked Fool: *How* the arts create change

Cydney Marie Leave a comment

When I was younger, I used to insist that the arts were the most effective agent of change. I’ve also heard arguments to the contrary: that the arts may inspire or even change minds, but that they do not by themselves create change, and that, for some, consuming political art without engaging in other forms of activism may serve as a cop out. I don’t disagree that this is a pitfall, but I do still think that the arts play a bigger role in creating change than we often give them credit for.

The intersection between arts and activism (or, as some would call it, “artivism”) has been an interest of mine for a long time. Lately, I’ve been trying to think expansively about the various roles the arts can play in creating change. I’m still not sure that what follows is an exhaustive list, but here’s what I’ve got so far:

Challenging Narratives

We tell ourselves stories all the freaking time. We think up stories about how our day might go and build memories into narratives to understand where we’ve come from. We tell ourselves stories about how the world works and our place within it, what we’re capable of, and how we relate to other people. And the arts are particularly adept at drawing these stories into question.

 If the story we tell ourselves is that everything is fine, things will most likely stay as they are. But if we tell ourselves that the ways things are is unjust, then at least some people will want change. In story B there’s at least of chance of change happening.

Maybe a book shows us how a scenario might play out differently, or a movie makes us see ourselves in different roles than those we are used to playing. Maybe there’s a plot twist or an ending  we never thought was possible. Collective narratives play a massive role in how we live our lives and what changes we choose to fight for. They can either uphold power structures or call them into question. Under the right circumstances, the arts can poke holes in narratives we may take for granted and help us understand what a different story could look like.

Educating

Whether we’re talking about a play with a clear plot or a painting that captures an artist’s state of mind, the arts can teach us about people, places, times, and ideas that are new to us. Expanding our worldview can call entrenched ways of thinking and being into question and expand our view of what is possible.

Humanizing

Part of what makes a narrative compelling is empathy. We can understand another living being’s experience because we’ve felt those same needs and emotions play through our own bodies. Maybe the circumstances were different, maybe the stakes weren’t as high, but the sensations are familiar. Understanding how a given narrative can cause someone joy or pain can help us better understand the difference between right and wrong. It helps us understand justice and care and why human beings act the way they do in all their complexity.

Inspiring

I think maybe this is the part some folks get stuck on when they say that the arts do not, in and of themselves, create change. But that doesn’t diminish its importance – if we’re going to fight for something we have to believe it’s important. We have to decide it’s worth taking a risk and raising the stakes. We have to see enough beauty in the story being proposed that we decide it’s worth the cost to get there. Maybe inspiration is still a step or two away from change, but sometimes it’s what kicks our butts and into action.

Visioning

What are we moving toward? What is possible? We want something better, but what might it look like? We may be able to name what the injustices are and insist that we want them abolished, but what do we want to build in their stead? Visioning is where we figure out how we’ll actually move into a more just future. It’s where we dive deep into our creativity to think about what could be. It gives us direction and tells us where to steer a movement, and gives us a comeback when those who would preserve unjust systems ask how we can possibly do better.

Healing

Oppressive systems rely on shame. Everyone has to know that whoever is being oppressed deserves it because they’re Bad, Defective, Lazy, etc. We’ve spent our lives being told stories about all of the ways in which we’ll never measure up and how our humanness is wrong. The arts can challenge these narratives, show us how things might be different, and help us picture ourselves in a future where we exist in wholeness.

Again, this is a working list. I’d be very interested to hear if anyone feels there are points that I’ve missed. But at this moment in time, especially, this is how I’m building a narrative for how I understand my role and what I want to accomplish.

Debriefing (In)Justice.

Taylor 1 Comment

(In)Justice. I read this as, “all justice is unjust because the system in which we have justice is flawed. It even perpetuates what we would call ‘injustice’; in fact, justice means nothing now because our society has corrupted the very linguistic notion of ‘justice’.”

But I think that was just me.

I went to the Word of Mouth Story Slam event on Thursday and was met with differing opinions on what this theme meant. I contributed anonymously via ‘my story in a sentence’: “Hither and thither: to revolt learn read become more, but less unbe burn unlearn–Thither and hither.” It was supposed to be a Joycean commentary on how concepts are cyclical and that we take, for example, injustice to incite revolution and learning and helping “progress” society by working through mistakes. To do so we must unlearn all that we’ve been taught, burn all that we’ve loved, and keep on pacing back and forth.

Because what we fight for today might not be what we fight for tomorrow.

All the people that presented were white, arguably heterosexual, of (at least now) upper middle class standing, arguably cisgendered. I’m not trying to say that injustice can’t happen to people of privilege, since that is whom the system was made by and working for, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting. The emcee framed the event by placing it within the context of MLK day and Black History Month. What came as a result were talks of upcharges on meals, inner greediness, and sharing stories that weren’t their own. At one point people made fun of the prison system, criminals, religious identities, and intersectionality.

The space was unjust for those that were there. The space got unsafe for potential stories and potential learning. The space had so much potential.

Having the event at Work Gallery was the best decision. This was an aesthete’s version of heaven. The band, The Good Plenty, played by the entrance and welcomed you into a space that was filled with white, blank walls and a few pieces of artwork. The light reflected off the white tin ceiling into a spectrum of color. Upon moving to the heart of the space, cheese and crackers and punch and dessert lined the aisle way. My mouth was greeted with red pepper spread and goat cheese. Doubling back to view the entrance, my face saw the beauty of the band playing and the people mingling.

What was beautiful: the sense of community. In one story someone shared that what they needed most in their moment being unjustly treated was love, family, support, and community.

In this terrible world what else can we strive for?

It’s now that I realize that one thing I can do in my life is to strengthen my relationships. I can work harder at being there for my friends, to provide a stronger support network. I can try harder to not hate love and all the trouble and mess it causes. I can seek out new relations that will help fill the void that I feel as a (cough cough) modern subject. So even when the last story was shared, the last cracker eaten, the last note played, the last coat grabbed, I could feel that even if I didn’t enjoy the stories (or their messages) I could still come away with a new goal. I could change myself into someone who loves more. Who is positive more often. Who shares and listens to stories, with open ears, everyday.