Following last week’s “#FelonCrushFriday” which sprung up due to the story of one (handsome) Jeremy Meeks, Harvard’s Eva Shang, the director of the Women and Men’s Empowerment and Prison Education Program at the University’s House of Public Service (there’s a mouthful), says that Meeks is no more worthy of our sympathy than other criminals. She also holds society culpable for the US’s high incarceration rate. USA Today reports:
Call me a naïve 18-year-old, but I believe that Meeks isn’t the exception. He is not the only incarcerated person worthy of our compassion.
As a volunteer, I’ve seen firsthand how affable, kind and just human people entangled with the criminal justice system can be. Walter, one of the men I worked with, cried all of one Tuesday morning because his wife of nine years was in the hospital, and he wasn’t sure if she would make it through. Like Meeks, he had children and a family and an immense capacity to feel — just like each one of us.
The American criminal justice system currently imprisons around 2.4 million people, including 71,000 juveniles. This doesn’t mean that we are responsible for 25% of the world’s evil, but rather than we’ve failed to give 2.4 million people a fair opportunity to succeed and then, once they’ve committed a crime, shoved them into a hostile criminal justice system that further alienates them from the rest of society.
Shang continues, noting that “broader society” has “cheated” many out of “the same opportunities for success,” and that “there is no fundamental distinction between ‘good people’ and ‘bad people.'”
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