Emma Pompeii

Integrative Seminar 2: Systems and Strategies

Midterm Paper

March 6, 2017

Redesigning the Scarlet Letter

  Beginning as a small idea in my mind, and moving to an issue that has disturbed, intrigued, and

challenged me to become involved, mass incarceration quickly became a relevant topic in my research.

The book that inspired my research heavily, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, was filled with

the cries of a generation that needs to make a change. “A felony is a modern way of saying, ‘I’m going to

hang you up and burn you.’ Once you get that F, you’re on fire.”1 It is quotes like these where Alexander

hits home, and makes us think about how we are living out a new racial caste system, by labeling

minorities felons. As the main topic of interest to me now, mass incarceration began as a small idea

mixed between myself and my two group partners. The progression of research, both individually and in

the group, has encouraged deeper thinking.

In our Studio 2: Systems and Strategies class, we were told to choose any issue of interest in our

world today and explore our mind for our initial thoughts on that issue. I decided that I had a personal

curiosity in gun control. We had to create a mind map, list all the things we associate, and what interests

us most about that issue. I found that I associated abuse of power, politics, and emotions with gun control.

We then had to match up our ideas with two other people in the class, and I ended up with Laurie and

Steven, as Laurie found that she was concerned with police brutality, and Steven in government

corruption. Our ideas coincided together with protection and abuse of power being main topics of

concern.

The hardest part about combining these three issues was finding how they connected into one

cohesive research topic. I began intensively researching gun control, first in the United States, about mass

shootings, and the laws we currently have. Then I reached out to a global scale, and researched the gun

laws in other countries that have less death by gun violence, mass shootings, and gun ownership than we

do in America. My main research question was, why? Why do these countries have significantly less rates

of gun deaths than we do? What are they doing that is so drastically different than we are? It was

interesting to look at gun control on a global scale, and see how our country is failing. Failing at

preventing gun deaths, and failing to decrease the amount of people who die every day. This led me to a

more specific topic; inner-city gun violence.

1 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012).

I quickly learned that inner-city gun violence, specifically focused on minorities lives in places

like the Southside of Chicago and Harlem, is the main area of concern when it comes to gun ownership.

While we always see mass shootings in the news, which are equally as terrifying and devastating, they

make up only one percent annually of all the gun deaths in America2. That number shocked me. I have

been so used to seeing all the horrifying mass shootings so prevalent in the news, but I didn’t know

anything about the shocking statistics of inner-city gun deaths.

This connection made from gun control to inner-city gun violence quickly led me to a link to

Laurie’s topic of police brutality. Through my research, I learned that most inner-city minorities own

guns because they fear the police, their aggression, and their authority. Inner-city residents believe the

police do not do a good job of protecting them, and therefore choose to take matters into their own hands.

Most people own guns for protection, from gangs, crossfire, and drive-byes, because they believe the

police are ineffective. They join gangs, buy weapons, and start becoming close with the bad parts of the

inner-city to protect their families. Yet, if they are caught with a weapon, they face a very long sentence

in prison3.

This project was interesting when we had to integrate all our interests into one idea that would

make sense to present to the class. Our ultimate idea was to research gun-violence as well as police

brutality in the Southside of Chicago. We decided to hone in on one place, so we could get more location

specific facts and hard hitting evidence. The further I got into my search, the more disturbed I became.

While focusing on the Southside, I came across many academic journals studying the effects of violence

on high school students in the Southside. I learned what CVE was (community violence exposure) and

how it mentally and emotionally affects children, and how it leads them to live a life full of violence and

crime. Living in the ghetto is not an easy place to grow up, or grow out of. Developing children are

creatures of habit, what they see they will duplicate, creating the never-ending violence and need for

protection4.

Further, as I researched violence in the Southside, I learned that 2016 was the bloodiest year on

record, showing that the issue is not getting any better. Chicago, being America’s third largest city, had

more homicides than its leading cities (New York and LA) combined. Chicago saw 2988 shooting

2 Lois Beckett, “How the Gun Control Debate Ignores Black Lives,” Pro Publica, November 24, 2015,

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-gun-control-debate-ignores-black-lives.3 Michael Sierra-Arevalo, “ Legal Cynicism and Protective Gun Ownership among active offenders in

Chicago,” Cogent Social Sciences, no. 2 (2016): 1-21. 4 Voisin, Dexter R., Jason D.P. Bird, Melissa Hardestry, and Cheg Shi Shiu. “African American

Adolescents Living and Coping with Community Violence on Chicago’s Southside.” Journal of

Interpersonal Violence, (2011): 2483-2498.

victims, 488 homicides, and 59 active gangs5. Among these horrifying statistics, black men largely

outweigh these numbers. Black men face a gun homicide rate of fifteen per 100,000 people, where white

men see only two per 100,000. More than thirty Americans are murdered every day in homicides – and

fifteen of those Americans are black men. They are nine times more likely to be victims of homicide than

white men, six times more likely than black women, and twenty-six times more likely than white women6.

After watching 13th, a Netflix documentary by Ana Duvernay, I realized that the real issue that I

could connect with my group’s ideas was mass incarceration. The increase in America’s prison

population in the past few years is astonishing, and is directly related to police occupation and the War on

Drugs. At this point in my research, I decided to focus solely on mass incarceration, and the police

occupation in the Southside of Chicago. The United States contains five percent of the world’s

population, but twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population – weighing in at 2.3 million

prisoners7. One in three black men from the Southside will go to prison, making it more likely for young

boys to go to prison than graduate college8. As shown in the statistics above, the violence and mass

incarceration of young black men greatly outweighs the statistics of white men.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander was

my next source for research, which opened my eyes and easily became the biggest influence on my

project. Alexander goes into detail about how mass incarceration is a new form of a racial caste system in

America. It is a new way for “the higher-ups” to assert their dominance and power against the minorities,

by locking them up for life for non-violent crimes and treating them like criminals.

“We make them their crimes”9, Alexander says. When the War on Drugs started during Reagan’s

presidency, black men were largely portrayed as the kingpins and criminals that needed to be “taken care

of.” Because of this blind racial stigma that was placed on black men, policemen, whether consciously or

5 Desmond Patton, Aparna Sodni, Steven Affinati, Jooylung Lee, and Marie Crandall. “Post-

Discharge Needs of Victims of Gun Violence in Chicago: A Qualitative Study,” Journal of

Interpersonal Violence, (2016): 1-21.6 Dexter R. Voisin, Jason D.P. Bird, Melissa Hardestry, and Cheg Shi Shiu. “African American

Adolescents Living and Coping with Community Violence on Chicago’s Southside,” Journal of

Interpersonal Violence, (2011): 2483-2498.7 Ana Duvernay, 13th, Documentary, directed by Ana Duvernay, (2016: Sherman Oaks, CA: Kandoo

Films, Netflix.)8 IBID9 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012).

unconsciously, could be completely racially biased in who they chose to pull over, search, and arrest. This

led to large police occupation in inner-city black communities, like the Southside, and incredible

mistreatment of the minorities because of these racial biases that they were being taught to live by. In this

way, we created a new Jim Crow. A new way to label black men; felons. Once a person is labeled a felon

they are shunned from society, from jobs, public housing, even the right to vote. They lose all rights and

wear an F on their chest, like a redesigned scarlet letter10.

Because of the three strikes and minimum sentencing laws, nonviolent criminals in possession of

small amounts of crack cocaine, which became huge during the beginning of the War on Drugs, caused

men to be put away for life, a form of cruel and unusual punishment11. While drug possession and

transportation is absolutely a crime, it still does not give police the right to treat young black men like

animals, like filthy criminals without rights. The unlawful searches and seizures which have become part

of everyday life for young men in the Southside is wrong, and shows the problem of our masked racism

as a country. A nonviolent criminal should not be put away for life, plain and simple. Yet it happens

every day without fail because of the three strikes and minimum sentencing laws12. Why on earth would a

nonviolent criminal, instead of giving them options of getting help and education, be locked up longer

than a violent criminal? Our justice system is completely sideways.

My research disturbed, upset, and intrigued me. It truly opened my eyes to something I had never

given much consideration to before. Looking at this subject from so many different perspectives,

especially from the view of 13th and The New Jim Crow, and seeing mass incarceration as a new racial

caste system gave a whole new idea to the issue. The way we treat minorities in this country is

overlooked, and needs to become more of a prevailing issue. My group did great research, and found that

each week we were each able to bring new and interesting information to the table. Our shared ideas gave

way to the complete project we came up with in the end, and as a start, I felt it was beneficial to get a

group perspective before going our own directions for the next project.

We worked hard as a group to present the ideas in a creative way to our classmates. This is not an

easy subject, nor a simple one, and coming up with the idea of how to present this mass of information in

an interesting way was a difficult task. As mentioned before, the installation was inspired by the quote in

The New Jim Crow, “once you get that F you’re on fire.”13 We chose to represent our information in the

form of red boxes containing our notecards, with the boxes arranged in the shape of a large F. Each box

had writing on the outside leading the reader toward what kind of information was inside each one. We 10 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012).11 IBID12 IBID13 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press, 2012).

also had charts next to the boxes to break down the information on one page. For our presentation, we

chose to research individuals who have fallen victim to mass incarceration, and unfair treatment under the

law. Locking up a person for a nonviolent crime for life is something that should never happen, and by

putting it into perspective with the amount of people in the classroom during our presentation allowed our

peers to realize just how often it happens. Along with a video in the background and hard-hitting images,

enforcing our point of victimization, defenselessness, and hardships.

Moving forward with this topic, I decided I wanted to focus more on the prison-industrial

complex; an idea that is just touched on in most of the sources I used including 13th and The New Jim

Crow. The issue of prison privatization is one of increasing concern, and the ways that capitalist

economies exploit their workers. Private prisons are turning bodies into profit and they actually benefit

from the horror that is mass incarceration14. The growth of private prisons in this century is steadily

increasing, and it is a huge topic of question. I want to discover where the funding comes from this

massive rise, and who gains from this tragedy. This leads me to the question that will inspire my research

for the rest of the semester, where are these private prisons, and who invests in them?

Bibliography

Alexander, Michelle. “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” New York:

The New Press. 2012. Alexander’s emotional and incredibly written book was the basis of my

14 Ana Duvernay, 13th, Documentary, directed by Ana Duvernay, (2016: Sherman Oaks, CA: Kandoo

Films, Netflix.)

research. This book is the reason that I could make connections between mass

incarceration and police brutality, and by reading this book and taking extensive notes, my

research became specific and reliable.

Beckett, Lois. “How the Gun Control Debate Ignores Black Lives.” Pro Publica. Last modified

November 24, 2015. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-gun-control-debate-ignores-

black-lives. At the beginning of this project, I began with basic online sources to get an idea for

the issue. This article on Pro Publica was my first introduction on inner-city violence and mass

incarceration. It gave a basis on homicide rates and inner-city crime, allowing me to understand

the severity of violence as a starting point for my research.

Duvernay, Ana. 13th. Documentary. Directed by Ana Duvernay. 2016. Sherman Oaks, CA: Kandoo

Films. Netflix. This Netflix original film was another main part of my research. Filled with

intense infographics and statistics about mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, I found this to

be one of the most beneficial sources that I utilized. It started analyzing civil rights through

history, and how masked racism affects our society today.

Franklin, H. Bruce. Prison Writing in 20th-century America. New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

By gathering more than sixty selections from some of the most powerful works written about

American prisons in the last hundred years, Franklin offers a view into prison life itself in modern

society. Considered a dramatic and unique collection, this book is a great way to expand my

research to inside the prison system, rather than looking at the outside research.

Guarino, Mark and Mark Berman. “Gun Violence Surges in Chicago, where residents want to show

‘everything is not all bad.’” Washington Post., Last Modified September 6, 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/09/06/gun-violence-is-surging-in-

chicago-where-residents-look-to-escape-fear-and-show-that-everything-is-not-all-

bad. This Washington Post article was another source I used as a basis to my research. Including

information about the rates of homicides in the Southside of Chicago, it put the state of inner-city

violence in perspective before I did more in depth scholarly research.

Jarecki, Eugene. The House I Live In. Documentary. Directed by Eugene Jarecki. 2012. London: British

Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Breaking the box office and getting ratings through the roof,

this documentary based on mass incarceration and the soaring imprisonment rates in America

covers the path we need to be on to change. Of the many documentaries on this topic, The House

I Live In has gotten great ratings and was originally produced in London, giving it an outsider’s \

view on the issue. I plan to watch this documentary in the future to broaden my research.

Patton, Desmond, Aparna Sodni, Steven Affinati, Jooylung Lee, and Marie Crandall. “Post-

Discharge Needs of Victims of Gun Violence in Chicago: A Qualitative Study.” Journal of

Interpersonal Violence, (2016): 1-21. This article in The Journal of Interpersonal Violence, a peer

reviewed and scholarly source, did a study on young black boys and girls living in the Southside

of Chicago. The study was to see how children in the Southside are affected by the aggressive

exposure to violence they experience every day. This article gave a good outlook on just how

badly fear and violence affects inner-city families.

Sierra-Arevalo, Michael. “Legal Cynicism and Protective Gun Ownership among active offenders in

Chicago.” Cogent Social Sciences, no. 2, (2016): 1-21. Published in the journal of Cogent Social

Sciences, this scholarly source is based around the illegal possession of weapons in the Southside.

This article was very important to my research, because it stated that many people own weapons

because they fear police brutality, and their effectiveness as a protective force. This was a great

tie between mass incarceration and police brutality.

Voisin, Dexter R., Jason D.P. Bird, Melissa Hardestry, and Cheg Shi Shiu. “African American

Adolescents Living and Coping with Community Violence on Chicago’s Southside.” Journal of

Interpersonal Violence, (2011): 2483-2498. This article is another published in The Journal of

Interpersonal Violence, and similarly to the one cited above, did a study on the affects of inner-

city violence, more specifically, on patients in the hospital. The most important information

gained from this article was just how many patients there are, again, showing the prevalence of

violence in the Southside.

Willoughby Nason, Julia and Nick Sandow. The Kalief Browder Story. Television mini-series. Created by

Julia Willoughby Nason and Nick Sandow. 2017. New York: The Cinemart. Spike TV. This TV series

which aired March 8 is about a young black man in New York City seeking justice for his 3-year

imprisonment at Riker’s Island and wrongful arrest. Seen as a major cry against mass

incarceration and unjust punishment in America, I plan to watch this television mini-series as the

next part of my research.

Final installation and graphs

Final installation by itself

Graph featured in 13th Documentary

Graph 2 featured in 13th Documentary that inspired my ideas for our installation

Original mind map created to map out interests in worldly issues – I chose gun control

My mind map created to connect the group ideas – I had Steven (who chose government corruption) and Laurie (who chose police brutality)

Sketch of the final installation idea – including text and size measurements

Second graph created for studio – when my ideas were focused around gun control