Playlist: The Trouble with Prison

How can we reform our prison system? Jennifer Lackey, Sister Helen Prejean, and Reginald Dwayne Betts advocate for restorative justice.

No matter who they are or in what capacity they interact with it, almost everyone who brushes up against the current U.S. criminal justice system agrees on one thing: it’s broken.

Northwestern University professor Jennifer Lackey teaches philosophy classes—not only on the pastoral campus of Northwestern, but also at a maximum-security state prison near Joliet. Her classes’ central questions—ethics, justice, systemic discrimination, punishment vs. rehabilitation, life and death—are hardly abstract for her students. Her class on mass incarceration, she says, “helps many of my students understand how they ended up in prison at all.” Lackey’s own research involves primarily epistemology—or, where and how we draw the lines between knowledge, opinion, and belief. Since working with the Prison Education Program, she has developed a particular interest in “the rationality of punishment, credibility and false confessions, (…) and disagreement.” In her 2019 TEDx lecture, The Prison Education Paradox, Lackey suggests that cutting off incarcerated people from opportunities for education and civic engagement is in direct opposition to what should be prescribed, if our goal is truly rehabilitation, and the breaking of the incarceration cycle.

Sister Helen Prejean is one of the world’s foremost anti-death penalty advocates, and “practically a household name in social justice circles and beyond.” A recent article about Prejean called her “the woman who helped change how America thinks about the death penalty”—and that’s not a stretch. Though best known for her 1993 memoir, Dead Man Walking (which has also been adapted into an award-winning film and opera), Prejean has been on the case for nearly forty years: acting as spiritual advisor to prisoners who have been sentenced to death; accompanying six of them during their executions; being instrumental in guiding the Catholic church to a strong stance against capital punishment; and being there at a local, state, and federal level every time a death-penalty case or law moved forward—or backward. Prejean’s new memoir—River of Fire—covers it all: Prejean’s winding, surprising road; the challenges of the Catholic Church; the complexities and lessons of engaging in your own spiritual journey while being looked to as a spiritual leader; and, of course, the long, uphill march toward criminal justice reform.

Reginald Dwayne Betts’ first book, A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison, was released when he was just twenty-nine years old. By the time it hit the shelves, Betts had already served eight years in prison, been released, completed his four-year undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, and delivered the commencement address at his graduation. And he was just getting started. Since then, he has graduated from Yale Law School, published two books of poetry (the newest, Felon, which explores post-prison life and identity, has just been released), and poured his energy, artistry, and intelligence into exposing and addressing the systemic flaws deeply embedded in the criminal justice system.

Header image: Hédi Benyounes | Unsplash