April302012
For our class, Freedom Reconsidered, each student was asked to do a final project. This project had to have some sort of involvement with what we were learning at the time. My fellow classmate and friend Chelsea and I came up with the idea to go to a jail and partake in one of the tutoring sessions. This seemed appropriate given the fact that I want to be an English teacher, and Chelsea has a passion for math. Going to this jail to tutor the inmates was more than a project, it became an experience that we from this moment on, will never forget.
Driving to the jail, Chelsea and I began to feel a bit nervous. We both turned to one another and said, “What did we get ourselves into?”
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5PM
The incarceration rate in our country is through the roof. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people behind bars. According to the Center of Economic Policy Research, only a striking 8.5% of federal prison inmates have committed a violent crime, leading us to a shocking number of 91.5% of inmates in prison that have committed non-violent offenses (CNBC). With such high numbers, one can only imagine the prison overcrowding and with that the horrible conditions as well as how much money is being put into prisons and jails. What many people fail to see is that these huge amounts of money are actually being wasted. Many inmates, especially ones locked up for substance abuse, will do their time and later on end right back up behind bars either for substance abuse again, or maybe for theft and assault as a result of substance abuse. By sending an offender to a treatment center rather than to jail, the nation saves about $5,680 a year per offender. In New Jersey, the state spends $42,000 a year to house an inmate and $11,300 to treat one (The Record). As a result
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10AM
Books Through Bars
For my service learning project I volunteered at the Books Through Bars organization in Philadelphia. I attended four times in the course of a month and I also brought along my Mom and brother to volunteer with me each one time. By bringing them with me to Books Through Bars we were able to start a discussion about the theme of this class fairly easily because they would ask “What do you need to volunteer for?” We were able to discuss many points about what the class covered throughout the semester like the disproportionate number of minorities compared to
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April232012
There are rules about job applicants with arrest or conviction records, and it’s time for companies to follow them.
April202012
A North Carolina judge concluded that racial bias played a significant factor when Marcus Reymond Robinson was sentenced to death 18 years ago, the first such decision under the Racial Justice Act.
March282012
An excerpt:
It is no disrespect to Trayvon Martin’s memory to point out that our ability to make him into a slogan is based less on who he was as a person than on our desire to fit him into a mold that will allow others to see him as worthy and deserving of justice. That mold is called the Innocent Victim, and its shape can be seen in the details that we choose to highlight and repeat ad nauseam about the case: He was unarmed, he was holding Skittles and Arizona Ice Tea, he was on foot, he had no criminal record, he was a “good kid.” Add whichever narrative that you’d like to hang on him here. It’s rather perverse, really, our collective love and desire for the innocent victim, the victim who “did nothing,” the victim who, we convince ourselves, must have been so pure that we immediately scoff at George Zimmerman’s alibi that he was acting in self-defense. What if Trayvon Martin had come at this white man who held a gun? Would his killing have been justified? Would we be protesting and petitioning as righteously as we are? What if he’d had, instead of Skittles, a bag of weed? Or a beer? Or a knife? Or something else that made it harder to make him look like a kid? How many fewer signatures would that correlate with on change.org?
March232012
My experience so far with this Service-Learning project has been a good one. I’ve completed most, but not all, of what I decided to do before documenting my thoughts and presenting them. Originally, I had only committed to transcribing prisoners’ responses to the BTB “If not prisons, what…” questionnaire. Although I hoped to be able to attend one of the book-packing sessions at BTB, I wasn’t sure if my schedule would allow it. Fortunately, I did find time and was able to go. I was also able to do some work during one of the designated Service-Learning days, entering prisoners’ responses from another BTB questionnaire into a spreadsheet that I assume will serve to organize the information gathered and make it more accessible/workable.
All of this has been interesting and gratifying, but I enjoyed my few hours at BTB the most. As altogether captivating as it is to transcribe letters and enter data (seriously though, that has been plenty interesting), I didn’t feel as connected to the process as I did when I was actually packaging the books and filling the orders. I found the work at BTB to be fun and encouraging. Fun because I’m a lit-nerd, and filling orders from the BTB stacks felt like a literary scavenger hunt, and encouraging because there were so many people there. There must have been more than two dozen volunteers, and during my time there I saw several people come in with boxes of books to be donated. It seemed like there was a lot getting done. After reading some of the requests, I got a sense of how urgently many of the prisoners looked forward to receiving their packages and how genuinely grateful they were for the service, and I was glad to have been a part of it.
—Eric
