Panelists met for the second Engage the Times session of the spring semester on Feb. 12.
During the hour-long Zoom session, which boasted around 30 participants, panelists answered the question: “Is the American prison system just?” They also fielded audience questions. The panel was composed of Dr. Brian Donavant, professor of Criminal Justice, Dr. Cindy Boyles, associate professor of Criminal Justice, and Alex Carr, a senior History major from Martin. Merry Brown, a Philosophy lecturer at UTM, served as moderator.
In considering the topic of the talk, all three panelists were similar in their views, although to what degree certain issues played in the inadequacy of the American prison system was a matter of debate.
Dr. Donavant led the discussion with a consideration of the panel’s central question:
“In a very short and overly-simplistic answer to the question: yes (the American prison system is just), but I’ll place an asterisk on that.”
Donavant advocated the idea that prison reform issues should not be considered in a vacuum, but must also involve a discussion of law enforcement and legislative components of criminal justice. For example, it may be that the prison system works more or less as intended, with some clear abuses, but that legislators are putting pressure on prisons that they were not designed to accommodate. Donavant, like all the panelists, underscored racial disparities and inequities in prosecution. He also touched on the importance of training for correctional officers, and how, in the state of Tennessee, the training regimes for new prison guards are not demanding enough.
Dr. Boyles, while agreeing with Dr. Donavant’s main points, was more strident in her condemnation of the prison system on racial grounds. She began by making reference to a recent study conducted at Harvard University. “Recently,” Boyles related, “there was a judge in Massachusetts that asked Harvard to conduct a study into why [the state] was incarcerating Black offenders at six times the rate [of whites], and they found that it [primarily] came down to racism.”
Boyles’ section of the talk focused primarily on the intersection between the prison system and identity issues, underscoring disparities in treatment for racial minorities, women, and the poor.
Carr took the stage with a series of prepared remarks. In his speech, which touched on his Christian faith and literary sources as disparate as Michel Foucault and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he touched on issues such as the death penalty, high rates of recidivism, and over-policing the poor while turning a blind eye to white-collar crime.
The term justice is defined as behaving in accord with what is morally right and fair. Currently, the United States has the highest per-capita rate of incarcerated persons in the world, even factoring in totalitarian states such as China and North Korea, at 639 persons per 100,000. With such a large population of prisoners, there is an equally large responsibility to treat them with decency and humanity.
-Alex Carr, UTM student
He ended with the austere warning that: “We have removed prisoners from equal moral consideration as regular persons then forgotten them, and this is a failure of human decency.”
The panelists then fielded questions from the moderator and the audience on a range of topics including putting an end to the private prison system, the intersection of mental health and prisons, the tradeoffs that communities make when investing heavily into policing as opposed to social services, extortionate rates of bail, and the tendency of the public and politicians to adopt an overly-punitive conception of the justice system.
Next week, Feb. 26, the Engage the Times panel will address the question of public civility again, with a panel entitled: “Can You Be Civil and Offensive? The Problems of Just Being Nice.” On the following week, March 5, Engage the Times will focus on ethical problems in human genome editing, with a panel called: “New Technologies, New Opportunities and Problems: CRISPR-Cas9.” More details on how to participate in Engage the Times can be found here.
