#staywonderful

Incarceration is not the answer to systematic problems.

There’s dynamite in every city of America.

It’s not hard to find. It’s in the neighborhoods people lock their car doors when driving through. It’s in the schools with no budget for arts programs or healthy school lunches. Find a batch in public housing. Find more outside on the streets.

Social dynamite, a term penned by Steven Spitzer in his book, “Towards a Marxian Theory of Deviance,” is defined as a group of people who have fallen through the cracks of the social system. This group is dissatisfied, rebellious and potentially violent. Youth living in dense urban centers make up this social dynamite. These youths, along with their families and friends, all go day to day living on the edge of a whirlpool of circumstance. One wrong move, and anyone can fall into a cycle of crime that, due to decades of government policies, make it near impossible to escape.

In 1965, the national poverty rate was around nineteen percent. Former President Lyndon B. Johnson started the War on Poverty, aiming “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it, and above all, prevent it.” This $1 billion-dollar program saw poverty as an individual problem, so programs focused on job corps and work experience.

Spoiler alert: poverty still exists. But the reasons why were much more complicated than the programs addressed. Two other wars against abstract entities, like the War on Crime, which was also by Johnson, and the War on Drugs by Nixon, also play a part in keeping low-income youth in a cycle. The War on Crime increased law enforcement. The War on Drugs responded to the 1980’s crack epidemic with incarceration instead of hospitalization.

Drug users should be treated as patients, not prisoners. In early versions of drug policies, drug users are not arrested, but are given treatment, which was effective in making sure that those patients do not fall back into the cycle. Drug users without such treatment are often arrested after their release and come back to prison due to their addiction. When convicts are released, they are denied housing, educational programs and employment and have trouble getting reintegrated into society.

Campaigns such as Ban the Box are seeking to get rid of questions regarding criminal history on job and housing applications. This encourages former convicts to apply to jobs without worrying about discrimination. Employers who implement this are told to ask about former felonies later in the job application process so that the previously incarcerated have a chance. States like Hawaii, California and Colorado have already changed their hiring practices and banned the box. 

Encouraging more states to make the change involves the participation of housing and employment agencies, council people and state representatives who understand that punishment should not extend beyond jail and into the lives of former convicts and their families. 

Unfortunately, this is a sentiment of many Americans. 

Picture a world where a person could pack a full-size bottle of shampoo in their carry-on and bring it with them onto a plane. In this world, airport lines take four minutes instead 40. Muslim people do not worry about being ‘randomly selected’ before every flight.

That world was before 2001.

The 9/11 attacks left the home of the brave reeling from shock, and rightfully so. Onlookers were traumatized. Newscasters watching the event unfold live tried to figure out if the smoke was from a fire, a freak plane accident, or even a repeat of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 9/11 earned its place as the most horrific attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.  

New York city rose from the ashes, but under the stories of courage and endurance was an undercurrent of fear and anger. Hate crimes against people from the Middle East and South Asia increased. Rais Bhuiyan, a Bengali Muslim immigrant working in a gas station, was shot in the face by a white supremacist seeking revenge for the attacks.

The 9/11 attacks were a catalyst for the creation of the 2001 USA Patriot Act, which allows law enforcement to detain, deport, utilize wire-tapping and conduct searches without a warrant. The fact that the Patriot Act was passed with the support of both parties shows how powerful 9/11 was not only in the destruction of ground zero but also the destruction of American citizens’ trust for outsiders. Lawmakers were willing to relinquish the freedoms and privacy of American citizens for the sake of terrorism protection, even if the systems created for that very purpose were ineffective overall. Even the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, has attracted controversy due to the invasive screening procedures created to prevent plane hijacking. These are the same invasive screening procedures that, according to tests run by Homeland Security Red Teams, don’t actually prevent passengers from smuggling bombs and other dangerous paraphernalia onto planes.

After 9/11, over a thousand people were detained, much of them from Arabian, Muslim and South Asian countries. The National Entry-Exit Registration System (NEERS) was an “extreme vetting” system former president George W. Bush implemented after the 9/11 attacks. Although the Obama administration attempted to dismantle NEERS due to its discriminatory nature, it is possible that the Trump administration might resurrect the system.

Today’s rise of legislation, much of which tread the fine line between being vigilant and being downright unconstitutional, harks back to the beginning of the millennia. When the Trump administration ordered a travel ban on those from Muslim-majority countries, people who had been living peacefully in America for years found themselves criminalized based on their faith and country of origin. 

Me: -pauses the game-

-looks up a walkthrough-

-looks up consequences of my choices-

-watches gameplay videos of what happens after my choices-

-goes on a forum discussing the choices-

-makes a list of pros and cons-

-stares at the screen for 3 more hours-

-makes two hard saves to "go back and choose the other option next time"-

-makes my choice-