“I was born in a world destined to fail.” – Tyler Anderson, “Acceptance”
“I now fully comprehend that we truly do live in a society that has for centuries practiced not only enslavement of the physical, but also enslavement of our minds and very soul.” Arthur Bell, “Dark Testament of Reflection”
“Justice, like the blood of Abel, slain by his brother Cain, cries out with hunger pangs.” – Corey Jasmin, “The Ecosystem of Justice”
After admitting to carrying drugs and a gun and receiving a prison sentence of over a one hundred and twenty-three years for doing so, Arthur Bell asks that his readers not consider his written reaction a “plea for mercy.” However much it appears unfair and however much the punishment outweighs the crime, Bell does not see sympathy as useful. What good are positive feelings and wishes for a man who feels entrapped in his “soul?” He ends his short reflection by claiming he would rather readers acknowledge the “rejection” for what “occurred to [him] personally.” The comment is curious. One is tempted to ask Bell; does he mean he feels rejected by the justice system? Or is he rejected by us? Our we as outsiders to the incarcerated rejecting those like Bell, ignoring those with hard time out of convenience? If so, what would it mean to acknowledge the incarcerated, and what would that look like?
An answer might lie in the reflections of Tyler Anderson and Corey Jasmin, two incarcerated writers who ponder justice as a practical and abstract concept. The latter admits to growing up in poverty, to being ignored by social workers, and to running away at fifteen-years-old. Like so many in his situation, he found community and place in the first people who offered him hope. Despite recognizing that “they were living wrong,” Anderson stayed because they saw he was “not the monster they paint me as.” Anderson, even if he uses a different term—monster—than Bell, ponders on the same pain of rejection. Being cast aside, and identifying that ostracization, is true torment. Enduring societal rejection can break just about anyone and creates the conditions that make crime possible. Or so Jasmin believes. When righteousness becomes common, “the forgotten of our land will feel dissuaded from taking justice into their own hands.”
Many of us are taught from a young age that justice is a higher power. It is a power available to governments and institutions that decide the fate of individuals who must confess to crimes. In other definitions justice is a karmic force, delivering repercussions in all manners and forms to those who committed wrongs and rewards to those who’ve done right. What Jasmin, Bell, and Anderson articulate is the notion that justice is a greedy concept misused to silence, discriminate, and ignore those deemed ‘monsters’ and those ‘rejected’ across society. For many incarcerated, justice is not the punishment, it is the act prior to it. The need of the forgotten to take “justice into their own hands” is an act of crying out, of attempting to be heard, and of redistributing opportunity that does not exist otherwise.
If there is a way forward Jasmin suggests it lies in understanding justice as multifaceted. Justice is not and should not be confined to the criminal realm. He writes, “there is a neglected nexus between criminal justice and social justice.” In learning to embrace latter dimensions of the term, one might reduce the errors of the former. Social justice is a response to Arthur Bell’s request. Social justice is the act of listening to society’s ills and responding to it.
It involves learning not to reject the monsters—even as society trains us to do so.
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