¶ … Video Discussion by Bryan Stevenson- A Ted Talk Presentation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2OxyQ
Discuss your reaction and ideas you have about the content of this video. Then, discuss your ideas in relation to Criminal Justice. Finally, discuss this in relation to you as a criminal justice professional.
Stevenson does have a valid concern in that it is alarming that one third of all black people are incarcerated at some point in their lives. However, automatically expecting the demographics of those arrested or jailed to match that of the demographics of the wider population is a misnomer because it assumes that both sets of people act in the proportionality. Of course, that is not true. As such, the "one in three" comment is misleading because it would seem to infer that this is only happening because of racism in terms of sentences and such. That is surely happening to some degree based on some of the things the author of this response has seen but there has to be other things going on. Poverty, lack of educational attainment and healthcare outcomes are also strikingly different along racial lines so there has to be a social/cultural component to these patterns and people getting jailed at a high rate is no different. Looking at an out-of-whack demographic stat and just calling racism is not a solution. People committing crimes ... no matter their color ... should face justice ... and the color of those people and the proportionality of the same should not matter. However, if the scales of who is involved in crime and who is not is out of proportion, the real causes of that should be figured out because the offenses are a symptom and not the disease (social problem) that needs to be addressed. Crime is crime ... and any crime should be punished the same for all races.
Unit 1 -- Part B
Discuss the roles of common law and statutory law in the American criminal justice system and what each can and cannot do.
Common law is good in that it goes off of tradition and prior events rather than statutes. It is good to have consistency but sometimes the events that are consistent are also wrong. With statutes, it is also good to have something clearly defined and so forth but being too consistent and across the board with statutes with no discretion prevents importantly different situations from being handled differently due to a lack of discretion. Too much discretion to deviate from the standards can be bad but too little discretion can be a bad thing as well.
Unit 2 - Part an A Video Discussion - A Ted Talk Presentation by Ted Wetzel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBYDq-rjvFk
Discuss your reaction and ideas you have about the content of this video. Then, discuss your ideas in relation to Criminal Justice. Finally, discuss this in relation to you as a criminal justice professional.
The video starts off by Mr. Wetzel lamenting that children are being taken from their homes and are placed with someone that is not there "parent." Indeed, there are some children that are taken for bad to...
However, any child protective employee will probably assert that there are a lot of biological parents who should not be because they cannot and/or will not take care of their kids. There are entirely too many kids being born out of wedlock and/or being raised with at least one biological parent missing and that pattern is one of the real problems. It's not the only part of the problem because the cycle of jailing of blacks is indeed a concern ... but there are crimes and bad behaviors leading to that and that is the real issue that needs to be addressed. The same precise thing can and should be said for white parents that commit any of the same offenses, whether it be neglect, a life of crime, drug use, etc.
Unit 2 - Part B
In the 19th century, inmates were considered "slaves of the state." How is that similar to and different from today's view of the status of inmates, given the court rulings and due process revolution of the 1960s and 1970s?
There has been a shift but it has been mostly to just warehousing people and the way in which this is being done is making non-violent inmates institutionalized and/or violent and it's making violent inmates even more violent. Beyond that, there are many instances where minorities are getting harsher sentences for the same crimes as whites. The view is unchanged in that inmates are viewed to be at the mercy of the guards. Non-compliant inmates are often tased, confined to solitary confinement and so forth. IN short, some things have changed but some have not.
Unit 3 - Part an A Video Discussion: A Ted Talk with David Dow: Lessons from Death Row Immates
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZOidcopG18
Discuss your reaction and ideas you have about the content of this video. Then, discuss your ideas in relation to Criminal Justice. Finally, discuss this in relation to you as a criminal justice professional.
The words and recollections of David Dow prove one thing about people that eventually end up in the criminal justice system and that is that environment and experiences during upbringing have a huge effect on how someone ends up as an adult, good or bad. His story about the kid whose father disappeared and whose mother was a paranoid schizophrenic is just one example. Couple that with the issue that death sentences are going down by life and life w/o parole are going up, we can be made to understand that some people that do commit violent acts are mentally scarred and damaged and many others are innocent but do not have the mental faculties to defend themselves.
Unit 3 - Part B
What is the difference between the role and function of jails and prisons historically and today?
This probably varies by jurisdiction, but jail would be for people who are detained and held upon arrest and/or for minor offenses while prisons are for nastier misdemeanors and/or felony offenses. For example, a murderer may initially be held at a jail upon arrest but they would go to a prison upon sentencing. Jail stays…
