the fascination with place
While attending UCLA, I was frequently reminded of the great pride UCLA takes in being the birthplace of the internet. It was a history-making accomplishment to be sure, and so intimately tied to place. Humans, at least all of the ones I’ve interacted with, have a kind of obsession with the notion of place. How fascinating that upon meeting you people most want to know your place of origin. “Where are you from?” and baffled when you say “no place in particular”. How the assignment of place to your person makes you someone recognizable all of a sudden. The first box the observer can, with confidence, place you inside of. Me, I am from Austin, Texas. Specifically, a suburban community tucked between two lakes Northwest of downtown. My first interaction with the criminal justice system occurred at six years old when my mom got pulled over for speeding and I sobbed in the backseat, unsure of her fate at that moment but aware that the presence of cops meant she was in trouble.
Understanding the country that I am from, the United States of America, requires understanding the system that holds it up and prevents it from dissolving in the face of crime and complicated ethical questions about a person’s right to do x, y, and z.
I seek to understand how a person went from being John from Cleveland to John from Cleveland who also spent eleven years behind bars, prior to that: nine hours with detectives, seven weeks in jail, sixteen hours before a judge, and twenty-two hours with their lawyer. How when someone meets John after he has served his prison sentence, he will now state to the people that meet him and seek to assign him a place of origin: “I am from Cleveland and the Lorain Correctional Institution.” People will view him differently, their brains chaotically trying to fit him into boxes they may not have created in their own minds before meeting John. Does John now fit into two boxes, Cleveland and the Lorain Correctional Institution, or one that melds the two together?
I want to understand the legal system in its most intricate form. I want to understand the system that has the power to assign people to places for, at times, the bulk of a person’s lifetime. Ultimately, I want to create a comprehensive sentencing database, to track a person’s time behind bars and its effectiveness at deterring future crime, parallel to the demographics of a person and the institution that decided how long that person would spend in a particular place.
To reach a point of me beginning to even understand how to tackle criminal justice reform, I must study the legal system that upholds it. Attaching a person to a place, a correctional facility, is molding that person’s identity, forever altering their answer to the question “Where are you from?”
