As I was listening to the podcast, I couldn’t help but think of my FYS from last year: Storytelling and Identity. The entire purpose of the class was to break down our assumptions around people in juvenile incarceration, so once a week we went to Bon Air Correctional Facility to talk to inmates. These visits weren’t meant to be serious or accusatory but were designed to show our similarities even across our different incomes, education levels, and life stories. Although they were incarcerated and I was not, there were many similarities between me and many of the guys that I spoke with. I had assumed that they would all be dangerous, aggressive, and vulgar when in reality, they were funny and interesting people. Because I had never interacted with someone who was in prison, I formed all of my ideas of a prisoner off of murder-mystery TV shows like Criminal Minds and Bones. Without exposure to this population, I saw them all as “abnormal” and automatically evil. In reality, most of them were detained on drug charges, larceny, or other non-violent crimes. Moreover, all of the inmates that I spoke to said that they committed their crimes out of need, not desire like the media prefers to portray.

Perhaps even more shocking was the fact out of the 20 plus inmates that I interacted with, not one of them was white or from an affluent area. The vast majority were black and the rest were Hispanic, with most of them coming from New Port News or Portsmith, which are both low-income areas of Virginia. This shows the racist nature of the justice system that Dr. Bezio discussed and how the canons that were put into place in the eighties are still very present. Most of the inmates had at least one parent that was currently incarcerated, and many had been put in foster care or abandoned either because both parents were in jail or the single parent could not afford to keep their child. In over-policing and over-charging POC and low-income people, it creates an inescapable cycle of poverty that compounds through generations and until this problem is addressed it will not go away.