This paper will analyze the potential for restorative justice for Rubin Carter as depicted in the film, The Hurricane. Drawing on Howard Zehr’s (2002) guiding questions, I believe a solution can be constructed for the harms done to Carter by the justice system.
Who has been hurt? The victim is Rubin Carter, an African-American man falsely convicted and imprisoned for the 1964 murder of three white patrons at a bar. The police harmed Carter by basing their investigation on racial prejudice and coerced false witness statements. The prosecution/courts harmed Carter when the case was "predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure” (Jewison, 2008). The harm created by retributive justice resulted in Carter’s wrongful conviction and incarceration. Carter was a prominent boxer and a hero to many African-Americans. In turn, his wrongful conviction harmed the African-American community at large.
What are their needs? Owing to the
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Carter needs exceptional assistance to become a productive member of the community. State funds will aid with his reintegration into life outside of prison. Success outside of prison will be challenging, especially due to his notoriety. The community around him needs to share in the assimilation process through an assurance of its service and time. The benefit of restorative justice applied to Carter is that there is no energy wasted on condemning those working in the judicial system. Moreover, the key to success in using restorative justice for Carter is the State’s guarantee to satisfy Carter’s needs. Restorative justice for Carter is also the correct thing to do for the community. It can help restore faith in the judicial system. Restorative justice requires moral leadership with the resolve to do the right thing—a difficult proposition based our judicial history—but a worthy
The hypocrisy and double standard that allowed whites to bring harm to blacks without fear of any repercussions had existed for years before the murder Tyson wrote about occurred in May of 1970 (Tyson 2004, 1). Lynching of black men was common place in the south as Billie Holiday sang her song “Strange Fruit” and the eyes of justice looked the other way. On the other side of the coin, justice was brought swiftly to those blacks who stepped out of line and brought harm to the white race. Take for instance Nate Turner, the slave who led a rebellion against whites. Even the Teel’s brought their own form of justice to Henry Marrow because he “said something” to one of their white wives (1).
Many changes are made inside the justice system, but very few have damaged the integrity of the system and the futures of citizens and prisoners. Although the story seems to focus more on lockdown, Hopkins clearly identifies the damaging change from rehabilitation in prisons to a strategy of locking up and containing the prisoners. To the writer, and furthermore the reader, the adjustment represented a failure to value lives. “More than 600,000- about 3 times what it was when I entered prison, sixteen years ago. In the resulting expansion of the nation’s prison systems, authorities have tended to dispense with much of the rehabilitative programming once prevalent in America’s penal institutions” (Hopkins 157). The new blueprint to lock every offender in prison for extended sentencing leads to an influx in incarcerated people. With each new person
There is no doubt in the minds of many people who are familiar with the Rubin "Hurricane" Carter story that he, and the man who was convicted for murder with him, John Artis, are innocent of those crimes. While no one knows for sure who is guilty of the crime, but the one thing that is for certain is that Carter and Artis were victims of racial bias from many people who would see them in jail. This story is truly a tragic one of a promising career, and of a life that was spoiled by prejudice and one that reviles some of the ways in which, society's present legal system can fail to ensure the right of justice for people in our society.
Throughout this paper, criticisms and praises will be mentioned in the borrowing of these ingenious practices, along with arriving to a conclusion of whether we are ready to deal with offenders in the restorative justice aspect. This is an important issue because, with a newly arrived program, we need to realize whether or not we are rushing into something that the criminal justice system is not ready for and also whether they are effective.
As Elie Wiesel once stated, “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented” (“Elie Wiesel Quote”). Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow, which discusses criminal justice and its role in mass incarceration, promotes a similar idea regarding silence when America’s racial caste system needs to be ended; however, Alexander promotes times when silence would actually be better for “the tormented.” The role of silence and lack of silence in the criminal justice system both contribute to wrongly accused individuals and growing populations behind bars.
Convicts rarely serve their entire sentences in prison (Ross and Richards, 146). To alleviate the costs of imprisonment on taxpayers and lessen the staggering populations of prisons across America, it is simply prudent to let inmates out on parole. Unfortunately, the parole system is imperfect and often leads to many ex-convicts recidivating. With the various trials and challenges that ex-convicts are bound to face when rejoining society after prison, Ross and Richards provide valuable lessons in their book of how a convict might survive beyond bars.
Question 1. Both Thomas Mathiesen and Stanley Cohen argue that alternative criminal justice responses that were presented after the 1970s were not real alternatives (Tabibi, 2015a). The ‘alternatives’ which are being questioned are community justice alternatives generally, and Restorative Justice specifically. The argument here is that Restorative Justice cannot be a real alternative because it is itself finished and is based on the premises of the old system (Mathiesen, 1974). Moreover, Restorative Justice is not an alternative, as it has not solved the issues surrounding the penal system (Tabibi, 2015a). Cohen (1985) supports this sentiment, and suggests that community based punishment alternatives have actually led to a widening and expansion
A growing number of probation officers, judges, prosecutors as well as other juvenile professionals are advocating for a juvenile justice system which is greatly based on restorative justice. These groups of people have been frustrated by the policy uncertainty between retribution and treatment as well as unrealistic and unclear public expectations. As a primary mission, the balanced approach or policy allows juvenile justice systems together with its agencies to improve in their capacity of protecting the community and ensuring accountability of the system and the offenders . It enables the youths to become productive and competent citizens. This guiding philosophical framework for this policy is restorative justice as it promotes the maximum involvement of the community, victim, and the offender in the justice process. Restorative justice also presents a viable alternative to sanctions as well as interventions that are based on traditional or retributive treatment assumptions. In the policy proposal for restorative justice, the balanced approach mission assists juvenile justice system in becoming more responsive to the needs of the community, victims, and the offenders . Therefore, this paper considers how restorative justice reduces referrals of juveniles to criminal and juvenile justice systems and gives a proposal on the implementation of restorative justice in the community together with a number of recommendations. For instance, preliminary research reveals that application of restorative justice in schools significantly reduces school expulsions, suspensions, and referrals to the criminal justice systems. Restorative justice programs are an alternative for zero-tolerance policies for juveniles or youths .
For much of the twentieth century, punishment and crime have portrayed some of the most powerful signs of the racial divide in the United States. Marginalized and the poor remains the most biased against the criminal justice scheme (Barak, 2010). Throughout the Americas. racial minorities were tried in white courtrooms by white juries. Class and race are challenging.
In James S. Hirsch’s book about Rubin "Hurricane" Cater, Hurricane, the author describes how Carter was wrongfully imprisoned and how he managed to become free. Hirsch tells about the nearly impossible battle for Carter and his friend John Artis for freedom and justice. Both, Carter and Artis, were convicted of a triple homicide, and both were innocent.
The criminal justice system is always criticized for a range of issues concerning the injustices that has taken place throughout history and even today. Many political leaders and social activists have sought to reform the criminal justice system; however, some have realized that there are systematic barriers that inhibit reformation. Political ...
Welch, Kelly. 2007. “Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling.” Journal of Contemporary Justice 23(3): 276-288 also talks about the discrimination within the courtroom, in the court it has been shown that the prosecutors when fighting a case against the defendant who’s client is Black use their race as an argument to win the case. They try to show how Black people are prone to be violent due to racial factors and therefore should be sentenced harshly. Given the history, unfortunately this argument sets in well and therefore leads to sentencing and prison time for the Black
This, however, is not the case in today’s judicial system. Justice is not blind, as our forefathers had intended it to be. According to the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, on the racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, African Americans are incarcerated in state prison at 6 times the rate of Caucasian Americans, and were sentenced to death at 5 times the rate. Furthermore, African Americans have an average sentence length of 40 months, compared to Caucasians average sentence length of 37 months. Those figures begin to widen exponentially as socioeconomic class is brought into the
Sung, L. G.-e. (2011). Rethinking Corrections: Rehabilitation, Reentry, and Reintegration. Thousand Oaks : SAGE Publications.
While other countries use different methods of incarceration-deterrence, incapacitation, and retribution-the United States uses the prison system of rehabilitation. This system of rehabilitation treats every prisoner as an equal that is meant to get the exact...