on my first day as an intern at Georgetown Law School I went to jail now
I wasn't arrested but interviewing clients and witnesses were parts of my
job as an investigator for the criminal justice clinic there Georgetown's law
clinics are full of dedicated and brilliant people to provide free legal
services to those who otherwise couldn't afford them and while I learned many
things in my time at Georgetown the most important thing I learned is something
that I'm pretty sure we're all familiar with it's an idea that I didn't learn
like we would here at Amherst in a classroom with facts or with philosophy
but by experience I learned that the truth is people are so much more than
the worst things that they've done in my time at the DC jail I met a man who
truly tried stealing from a convenience store I met a woman who truly drove with
an open container of alcohol in her car and I met a man who truly killed someone
but each and every time that I left the DC jail I just became more and more
aware of the privilege that it was to leave that the people who we deemed
criminals who we lock up are much more mundane than we care to admit nothing
pathological or evil about them they're are our grandparents and our mothers
there are uncle and our brothers in the United States we have rationalized and
legalized treating criminals dishonestly as if they don't deserve our empathy and
that indeed may be why the United States with 4% of the world's population is
home to 22% of its criminals because we lie to ourselves we treat social issues
like mental illness addiction and poverty as if they were legal issues and
in doing so we reduce people's lives down to the simple fact of a single act
that they may have committed and we ignore the multitude of their individual
for the more palatable fiction that they are broken and and therefore disposable
the poet Terence Hayes says it best when he cautions us to never mistake what it
is for what it looks like and with every time I went to the DC jail I became more
and more aware of the chasm that's treacherous between the the theoretical
desire to punish criminals and actually punishing that person because the truth
is people are so much more than the things that they've done the man that I
met truly did steal something from a convenience store I saw a video
recording of it and it's unfortunate but he's one of the nicest people I've met
every time I went to the jail he he greeted me with the smile and two
newspapers one for me and one for himself and this is because he says that
the DC chairs they have diseases all over them and while this is true it's
also true that he was over fifty years old and that because of the crime he'd
been convicted of he was going to spend upwards of 180 days in jail it's also
true that it doesn't make any sense that he was fined when he couldn't even afford
to feed himself the woman that I met truly did drive with an open container
of alcohol in her car it was a beer but it's also true that she loves sodoku and
that I remind her of her son and that she did not deserve to spend over 150
extra days in jail not as a part of her sentence but just as a pure oversight on
behalf of the jail it's also true that none of her time in jail deserved or
extra helped her with what was probably an alcohol addiction you learn none of
these things by calling these people criminals because calling someone a
criminal only serves to attempt to remove our obligation for empathy
because calling someone a criminal reduces them to the worst parts of their
past the man that I mentioned before who killed someone did so as a 16 year old
child his mother abandoned him and his father abused him and under pressure
from the only adult family members in his life he took someone else's but that
man is now in his 40s and he's a grandfather but he's only been able to
see his grandchild in photographs and in courtrooms and while it is true that he
did something awful it's also true that it was just one thing as a part of many
things that define who he is calling someone a criminal trapped someone with
our words just as much as a bars of their cell I'm not speaking to absolve
anyone of the truth of the harm that they may have caused that's impossible
but I am asking us to interrogate our responses to their actions particularly
in light of the truth of their contexts the man who'd been incarcerated for
longer than many of us in this room have been alive is so much more than a
criminal he's worked as a tutor and as a mentor and as he'll proudly tell you
today he worked to build the road signs that you see and use in Washington DC
today calling him a criminal erases all of that information the reason that I'm
speaking is simply to get us to think because our thoughts have implications
on how we vote and how we act as jury members and employers and as members of
our community calling someone a criminal is a hollow label and how it is filled
with compassion or with caricature is completely up to us the man who'd been
incarcerated since before the internet was even a thing called me on the phone
a couple months ago and when I picked up the phone the first thing he asked me
was why I was smiling granted he couldn't see me and I can't
explain how he knew other than that just the type of person that he is but as I
helped him figure out how to use the Internet something that I'm sure we're
all familiar with now I was reminded of the fact that he'd finally been able to
do something that I did every time that I went to the DC jail and that's leave
the truth is that people are so much more than the worst things that they've
done