Hey Ashley,

Having read your paper, I think I understand what Eben is getting at. Your paper puts forward an argument clearly and persuasively, and it succeeds as a piece of writing. What it doesn't capture, however, is you.

The underlying question that your paper raises for the reader is, given that the justice system disproportionally impacts minorities in harmful ways, why do you want to be involved in this work? Adding minority representation to law enforcement might eliminate racists from positions of power, but it does nothing to reduce the impact of systematic or social injustice. An African-American AUSA is still pushing forward the same destructive drug prosecutions and advocating for the same destructive mandatory sentencing guidelines with the same disparate impact--why do you want to be the person pulling the lever?

Now it might be that you feel that personal criminal responsibility generally supersedes the underlying impact of social and economic injustice. It might be that you feel that impoverishment or a history of discrimination is neither excuse nor justification for committing an armed robbery or attempting a rape or generally flouting the law. Alternatively, you might truly believe in the value of the laws you want to enforce: a true crusader against drugs, to use the above example. Or perhaps you feel that crime, at its most basic level, is solely about a victimizer and a victim--no matter their respective racial backgrounds.

I understand the motivation to help challenge the marred perception of law enforcement becoming involved and doing your job professionally and well--taking the power out of the hands of those that would abuse it. Yet the question you leave open is how you intend to reconcile yourself to the more subtle, yet still dangerous, problem of affecting peoples' lives, often in a racially disproportionate manner, due to systems outside of your control. You may have a solid rationale for defending such a choice. You may find that being part of such a system doesn't quite sit well with you, such that you need to reconsider your position. Either way, therein lies an interesting and provocative question that your essay hints at but ultimately skirts.

--Main.RonMazor - 1 Apr 2010

Lastly, I am driven to succeed and I hope that that drive continues.

It's hard to think of anyone who would really want to disagree with any of the propositions you advance, Ashley. There may be people who aren't familiar with your statistics, but they're not people who have ever thought about these issues before, and no matter how inexperienced they are, the case for not having more minority representation in the justice system is not very popular or very easy to make.

So the primary drawback to this essay is that you played it completely safe. I can't dispute with you the proposition that the ideas expressed here seemed unfamiliar to you: if you tell me these are the ideas you had, as opposed to familiar ideas that you've seen before and that felt a little old to you even as you put them down on the page, I'm not going to doubt you. But when I look at the publications of the organizations you mention, or consider what was said ad nauseam about that single sentence of Sonia Sotomayor's as a result of the meaningless Arnoldian flap created by Republicans seeking partisan advantage from opposing her nomination, I can't locate any sentence of your draft that isn't something said elsewhere within reach of the sources you cited or the incident you discuss.

It seems to me that you've worried so much about not failing that you've hindered yourself from success. The goal is to experiment with two activities: (1) generating new ideas, and (2) communicating them to others in ways that persuade others to engage. There's an inherent risk in having new ideas, but the risk lies in a different quarter than it seems to me you expect. It feels to me as though your primary concern is to avoid having a "wrong" idea. But as I keep struggling to express for people, a "wrong" idea can be more useful than a "right" idea if it leads to other ideas that are in turn valuable to our process of thought. Failed experiments and wrong ideas are inherently necessary to learning; it's only brain-dead systems of perversely stupid mis-evaluation that treat failed experiments as indications of poor performance.

Suppose you want to teach people to ask better questions, meaning questions that are more insightful, more basic, and which lead to broader and more durable learning experiences? How would you teach asking better questions? In my view, you would encourage people to ask questions, first by providing examples of provocative questions that people haven't asked themselves before, then by experiments in asking questions, following the questions beyond their answers to their implications, and then lastly by editing the resulting thought process to improve the breadth, daring, and sophistication of the question asked.

So that's what we're doing. But if concern to avoid failure of an experiment—which is not in itself a bad thing and is absolutely certain to accompany most meaningful learning experiences—prevents you from asking questions of any breadth or daring, the progress we can make is stringently limited.

So I'd shift the question someplace much less familiar, less safe, and more likely to lead in new directions.

The Merits of Increasing Minority Presence in the Criminal Justice System

The Incarceration Disparity

Minority Participation as a Safeguard Against Institutional Racism

Race in the Judiciary

Conclusion

Paper Title

-- By AshleySimpson - 23 Feb 2010

Section I

Subsection A

Subsub 1

Subsection B

Subsub 1

Subsub 2

Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

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