Parole boards often deny release because it would "deprecate the seriousness of the offense." This is a paradoxical justification because the original offense never becomes less serious. It creates a Catch-22 that effectively ignores any evidence of an individual's rehabilitation or personal change over decades.
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Risk assessment tools used in courts are often trained on old data and fail to account for societal shifts in crime and policing, creating "cohort bias." This leads to massive overpredictions of an individual's likelihood to commit a crime, resulting in harsher, unjust sentences.
People often frame a person's situation as a "choice" to justify punishment or unsympathetic treatment. This linguistic move shifts blame onto the individual, providing a moral license to enact punishment. This pattern is prevalent in contexts ranging from airline policies to broader political discourse.
Most crimes are committed by people under 35, and recidivism rates for those over 50 are near zero. Despite this, the fastest-growing demographic in U.S. prisons is people over 55. This highlights a costly misalignment between sentencing policies and the reality of criminal behavior over a lifespan.
How people tell their life story is a roadmap for their future. Those who consistently cast themselves as victims of circumstance are unlikely to recover from addiction because the narrative prevents them from acknowledging their own contribution to their problems, which is necessary for change.
Our culture equates accountability with punishment. A more powerful form of accountability is making someone a co-owner in solving the root problem. This ensures the issue doesn't recur and is the ultimate form of taking responsibility for one's actions.
Studies reveal a shocking link between a judge's physical state and their rulings. The likelihood of a favorable ruling, like parole, drops significantly as the time since their last meal increases, highlighting how biology can override rational judgment.
Extreme political ideologies, despite appearing opposite, can lead to functionally identical conclusions. The debate over Alcatraz's future illustrates this, where the far-right's desire for a prison functionally mirrors the far-left's proposal for low-income housing, revealing a 'circularity' to political logic.
Despite having the world's largest prison population, the United States lacks an agreed-upon reason for why it punishes. Prisons are called "correctional facilities" but often cause more crime than they prevent. This foundational confusion leads to arbitrary and ineffective systems that warehouse people.
Shaka Senghor reframes the experience of incarceration not as a defining event, but as a revealing one. It strips away everything superficial and exposes a person's core essence, particularly their innate resilience and will to overcome adversity.
The focus on pardoning political allies diverts legal resources and attention away from tens of thousands of ordinary inmates with legitimate clemency cases. This creates a two-tiered justice system where political loyalty is prioritized over rectifying potential miscarriages of justice for the general population.
