Blog 5

  

The second half of my discussion with Katrice Williams allowed me to draw a lot of connections to my second semester English class, philosophy, and justice. In this class, we talked a lot about the philosophy and rightfulness behind crime and subsequent criminalization. In both my conversation and the class, one of my biggest takeaways is how widespread and pervasive the justice system is. I learned that a majority of mental illness patients are treated in prisons. The cross-section between mental illness and the justice system is so wide. For the people that are sentenced to prison and also deal with mental health issues, criminality is not entirely their fault. Their mental issues need to be dealt with first, and then perhaps they would not commit crimes. Some symptoms of mental illness put inmates into isolation. This often intensifies the symptoms. Inmates are not getting help in prison, however, judges do not want to release a person unless they are “stable.” An alternative could be these inmates could in fact never be inmates and instead, be treated in a community treatment center.

Another big issue is how easy it is to enter the justice system. One big example of this is truancy. It does not seem right that a murderer and someone who skips school can end up in the same place resulting solely from those actions. Truancy should not be a pipeline to the justice system. Another way you can enter the justice system can simply result from a traffic ticket. If you are assigned a court date for a ticket, many people are able to afford a lawyer to get them out of this assignment. However, the economically marginalized population cannot afford this. If someone misses their court dates, there is now a warrant out for their arrest, leading to inevitable time spent behind bars. While no one should be able to skip a court date, there may be extenuating circumstances such as not being able to miss a day of work. There are many aspects of our justice system that set it up to unproportionately negatively affect those who have low incomes.

 

 

 

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