Juvenile Justice Essay writing Materials
Dr. Matt Whoolery
Dr. Matt Whoolery said in his _________TED Talk, that if someone wanted to be unhappy all he or she would have to do is follow the following three rules: number one, avoid the present…Live in either the past which he or she cannot do anything about or live in the future which only exists in his or her brain. Number two, live a sedentary life. In other words, don’t do anything at all, just sit around watching TV shows, movies, or talk to anyone who doesn’t have a job or has anything to do. Whoolery goes on to say the third thing to do would be to think of only oneself. In other words, one should think only about what would make one happy. For example, one should not think about pleasing anyone else except for oneself. This means that one should not think of one’s family, friends, and obligations; one should only think of oneself.
Dr. Matt Whoolery said in his _________TED Talk, that if someone wanted to be unhappy all he or she would have to do is follow the following three rules: number one, avoid the present…Live in either the past which he or she cannot do anything about or live in the future which only exists in his or her brain. Number two, live a sedentary life. In other words, don’t do anything at all, just sit around watching TV shows, movies, or talk to anyone who doesn’t have a job or has anything to do. Whoolery goes on to say the third thing to do would be to think of only oneself. In other words, one should think only about what would make one happy. For example, one should not think about pleasing anyone else except for oneself. This means that one should not think of one’s family, friends, and obligations; one should only think of oneself.
Sam Richards Ted Talk
My students often ask me, "What is sociology?" And I tell them, "It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see." And they say, "So how can I be a sociologist? How can I understand those invisible forces?" And I say, "Empathy. Start with empathy. It all begins with empathy. Take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person."
3:03Can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes? Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there or a truck full of soldiers? And just imagine what you would feel. Because you know why they're here, and you know what they're doing here. And you just feel the anger and you feel the fear. If you can, that's empathy -- that's empathy. You've left your shoes, and you've stood in mine. And you've got to feel that.
Sam Richards is a Penn State professor of sociology who said in a 2013 TED Talk, “Sociology is the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see." In other words, ……………………………………… For example, a teenager can easily be shaped by………………………………………………………………………………….. Richards goes on to say, “it all begins with empathy.” In other words, to properly understand how and why young people get involved in dangerous situations and eventually incarcerated one needs to practice some empathy for those young people and ask themselves if there might be a better way to handle juvenile injustice. People need to simply take themselves out of their shoes and put themselves into the shoes of our wayward youth-especially those who have an inclination for trouble.
Sam Richards Ted Talk
My students often ask me, "What is sociology?" And I tell them, "It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see." And they say, "So how can I be a sociologist? How can I understand those invisible forces?" And I say, "Empathy. Start with empathy. It all begins with empathy. Take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person."
3:03Can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes? Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there or a truck full of soldiers? And just imagine what you would feel. Because you know why they're here, and you know what they're doing here. And you just feel the anger and you feel the fear. If you can, that's empathy -- that's empathy. You've left your shoes, and you've stood in mine. And you've got to feel that.
Sam Richards is a Penn State professor of sociology who said in a 2013 TED Talk, “Sociology is the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see." In other words, ……………………………………… For example, a teenager can easily be shaped by………………………………………………………………………………….. Richards goes on to say, “it all begins with empathy.” In other words, to properly understand how and why young people get involved in dangerous situations and eventually incarcerated one needs to practice some empathy for those young people and ask themselves if there might be a better way to handle juvenile injustice. People need to simply take themselves out of their shoes and put themselves into the shoes of our wayward youth-especially those who have an inclination for trouble.
Experts say that if children can't read by the end of the fifth grade, they lose self-confidence and self-esteem, making them more likely to enter the juvenile justice system.Dirk Kempthorne Marian Wright Edelman Gil Garcetti Isaac Asimov Ruben Hinojosa Q'orianka Kilcher
Adam Foss
“A Prosecutor’s Vision for a Better Justice System”
TED Talk
2016
0:20 I am a prosecutor. I believe in law and order. I am the adopted son of a police officer, a Marine and a hairdresser. I believe in accountability and that we should all be safe in our communities. I love my job and the people that do it. I just think that it's our responsibility to do it better.
0:4 By a show of hands, how many of you, by the age of 25, had either acted up in school, went somewhere you were specifically told to stay out of, or drank alcohol before your legal age?
1:00 How many of you shoplifted, tried an illegal drug or got into a physical fight -- yes, even with a sibling? Now, how many of you ever spent one day in jail for any of those decisions? How many of you sitting here today think that you're a danger to society or should be defined by those actions of youthful indiscretion?
1:34When we talk about criminal justice reform, we often focus on a few things, and that's what I want to talk to you about today. But first I'm going to -- since you shared with me, I'm going to give you a confession on my part. I went to law school to make money. I had no interest in being a public servant, I had no interest in criminal law, and I definitely didn't think that I would ever be a prosecutor.
1:59Near the end of my first year of law school, I got an internship in the Roxbury Division of Boston Municipal Court. I knew of Roxbury as an impoverished neighborhood in Boston, plagued by gun violence and drug crime. My life and my legal career changed the first day of that internship. I walked into a courtroom, and I saw an auditorium of people who, one by one, would approach the front of that courtroom to say two words and two words only: "Not guilty." They were predominately black and brown. And then a judge, a defense attorney and a prosecutor would make life-altering decisions about that person without their input. They were predominately white. As each person, one by one, approached the front of that courtroom, I couldn't stop but think: How did they get here? I wanted to know their stories. And as the prosecutor read the facts of each case, I was thinking to myself, we could have predicted that. That seems so preventable... not because I was an expert in criminal law, but because it was common sense.
3:12Over the course of the internship, I began to recognize people in the auditorium, not because they were criminal masterminds but because they were coming to us for help and we were sending them out without any.
3:24My second year of law school I worked as a paralegal for a defense attorney, and in that experience I met many young men accused of murder. Even in our "worst," I saw human stories. And they all contained childhood trauma, victimization, poverty, loss, disengagement from school, early interaction with the police and the criminal justice system, all leading to a seat in a courtroom. Those convicted of murder were condemned to die in prison, and it was during those meetings with those men that I couldn't fathom why we would spend so much money to keep this one person in jail for the next 80 years when we could have reinvested it up front, and perhaps prevented the whole thing from happening in the first place.
4:06(Applause)
4:11My third year of law school, I defended people accused of small street crimes, mostly mentally ill, mostly homeless, mostly drug-addicted, all in need of help. They would come to us, and we would send them away without that help. They were in need of our assistance. But we weren't giving them any. Prosecuted, adjudged and defended by people who knew nothing about them.
4:43The staggering inefficiency is what drove me to criminal justice work. The unfairness of it all made me want to be a defender. The power dynamic that I came to understandmade me become a prosecutor.
4:58I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about the problem. We know the criminal justice system needs reform, we know there are 2.3 million people in American jails and prisons, making us the most incarcerated nation on the planet. We know there's another seven million people on probation or parole, we know that the criminal justice system disproportionately affects people of color, particularly poor people of color. And we know there are system failures happening everywhere that bring people to our courtrooms. But what we do not discuss is how ill-equipped our prosecutors are to receive them. When we talk about criminal justice reform, we, as a society, focus on three things. We complain, we tweet, we protest about the police, about sentencing laws and about prison. We rarely, if ever, talk about the prosecutor.
5:45In the fall of 2009, a young man was arrested by the Boston Police Department. He was 18 years old, he was African American and he was a senior at a local public school. He had his sights set on college but his part-time, minimum-wage job wasn't providing the financial opportunity he needed to enroll in school. In a series of bad decisions, he stole 30 laptops from a store and sold them on the Internet. This led to his arrest and a criminal complaint of 30 felony charges. The potential jail time he faced is what stressed Christopher out the most. But what he had little understanding of was the impact a criminal record would have on his future.
6:27I was standing in arraignments that day when Christopher's case came across my desk. And at the risk of sounding dramatic, in that moment, I had Christopher's life in my hands. I was 29 years old, a brand-new prosecutor, and I had little appreciation for how the decisions I would make would impact Christopher's life. Christopher's case was a serious one and it needed to be dealt with as such, but I didn't think branding him a felon for the rest of his life was the right answer.
6:55For the most part, prosecutors step onto the job with little appreciation of the impact of our decisions, regardless of our intent. Despite our broad discretion, we learn to avoid risk at all cost, rendering our discretion basically useless. History has conditioned us to believe that somehow, the criminal justice system brings about accountability and improves public safety, despite evidence to the contrary. We're judged internally and externally by our convictions and our trial wins, so prosecutors aren't really incentivized to be creative at our case dispositions, or to take risks on people we might not otherwise. We stick to an outdated method, counterproductive to achieving the very goal that we all want, and that's safer communities.
7:41Yet most prosecutors standing in my space would have arraigned Christopher. They have little appreciation for what we can do. Arraigning Christopher would give him a criminal record, making it harder for him to get a job, setting in motion a cycle that defines the failing criminal justice system today. With a criminal record and without a job, Christopher would be unable to find employment, education or stable housing. Without those protective factors in his life, Christopher would be more likely to commit further, more serious crime. The more contact Christopher had with the criminal justice system, the more likely it would be that he would return again and again and again -- all at tremendous social cost to his children, to his family and to his peers. And, ladies and gentlemen, it is a terrible public safety outcome for the rest of us.
8:35When I came out of law school, I did the same thing as everybody else. I came out as a prosecutor expected to do justice, but I never learned what justice was in my classes --none of us do. None of us do.
8:49And yet, prosecutors are the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system. Our power is virtually boundless. In most cases, not the judge, not the police, not the legislature, not the mayor, not the governor, not the President can tell us how to prosecute our cases. The decision to arraign Christopher and give him a criminal record was exclusively mine. I would choose whether to prosecute him for 30 felonies, for one felony, for a misdemeanor, or at all. I would choose whether to leverage Christopher into a plea deal or take the case to trial, and ultimately, I would be in a position to ask for Christopher to go to jail. These are decisions that prosecutors make every day unfettered, and we are unaware and untrained of the grave consequences of those decisions.
9:39One night this past summer, I was at a small gathering of professional men of color from around the city. As I stood there stuffing free finger sandwiches into my mouth, as you do as public servant --
9:50(Laughter)
9:51I noticed across the room, a young man waving and smiling at me and approaching me. And I recognized him, but I couldn't place from where, and before I knew it, this young man was hugging me. And thanking me. "You cared about me, and you changed my life." It was Christopher.
10:14See, I never arraigned Christopher. He never faced a judge or a jail, he never had a criminal record. Instead, I worked with Christopher; first on being accountable for his actions, and then, putting him in a position where he wouldn't re-offend. We recovered 75 percent of the computers that he sold and gave them back to Best Buy, and came up with a financial plan to repay for the computers we couldn't recover. Christopher did community service. He wrote an essay reflecting on how this case could impact his future and that of the community. He applied to college, he obtained financial aid, and he went on to graduate from a four-year school.
10:49(Applause)
10:56After we finished hugging, I looked at his name tag, to learn that Christopher was the manager of a large bank in Boston. Christopher had accomplished -- and making a lot more money than me --
11:05(Laughter)
11:06He had accomplished all of this in the six years since I had first seen him in Roxbury Court. I can't take credit for Christopher's journey to success, but I certainly did my part to keep him on the path.
11:19There are thousands of Christophers out there, some locked in our jails and prisons. We need thousands of prosecutors to recognize that and to protect them. An employed Christopher is better for public safety than a condemned one. It's a bigger win for all of us. In retrospect, the decision not to throw the book at Christopher makes perfect sense. When I saw him that first day in Roxbury Court, I didn't see a criminal standing there. I saw myself -- a young person in need of intervention. As an individual caught selling a large quantity of drugs in my late teens, I knew firsthand the power of opportunity as opposed to the wrath of the criminal justice system. Along the way, with the help and guidance of my district attorney, my supervisor and judges, I learned the power of the prosecutor to change lives instead of ruining them.
12:17And that's how we do it in Boston. We helped a woman who was arrested for stealing groceries to feed her kids get a job. Instead of putting an abused teenager in adult jail for punching another teenager, we secured mental health treatment and community supervision. A runaway girl who was arrested for prostituting, to survive on the streets, needed a safe place to live and grow -- something we could help her with. I even helped a young man who was so afraid of the older gang kids showing up after school, that one morning instead of a lunchbox into his backpack, he put a loaded 9-millimeter. We would spend our time that we'd normally take prepping our cases for months and months for trial down the road by coming up with real solutions to the problems as they presented.
13:03Which is the better way to spend our time? How would you prefer your prosecutors to spend theirs? Why are we spending 80 billion dollars on a prison industry that we know is failing, when we could take that money and reallocate it into education, into mental health treatment, into substance abuse treatment and to community investment so we can develop our neighborhoods?
13:25(Applause)
13:32So why should this matter to you? Well, one, we're spending a lot of money. Our money. It costs 109,000 dollars in some states to lock up a teenager for a year, with a 60 percent chance that that person will return to the very same system. That is a terrible return on investment.
13:53Number two: it's the right thing to do. If prosecutors were a part of creating the problem, it's incumbent on us to create a solution and we can do that using other disciplines that have already done the data and research for us.
14:05And number three: your voice and your vote can make that happen. The next time there's a local district attorney's election in your jurisdiction, ask candidates these questions. One: What are you doing to make me and my neighbors safer? Two: What data are you collecting, and how are you training your prosecutors to make sure that it's working? And number three: If it's not working for everybody, what are you doing to fix it? If they can't answer the questions, they shouldn't be doing the job.
14:34Each one of you that raised your hand at the beginning of this talk is a living, breathing example of the power of opportunity, of intervention, of support and of love. While each of you may have faced your own brand of discipline for whatever malfeasances you committed, barely any of you needed a day in jail to make you the people that you are today -- some of the greatest minds on the planet.
14:56Every day, thousands of times a day, prosecutors around the United States wield power so great that it can bring about catastrophe as quickly as it can bring about opportunity, intervention, support and yes, even love. Those qualities are the hallmarks of a strong community, and a strong community is a safe one. If our communities are broken, don't let the lawyers that you elect fix them with outdated, inefficient, expensive methods.
15:22Demand more; vote for the prosecutor who's helping people stay out of jail, not putting them in.
15:27
Demand better. You deserve it, your children deserve it, the people who are tied up in the system deserve it, but most of all, the people that we are sworn to protect and do justice for demand it.
“A Prosecutor’s Vision for a Better Justice System”
TED Talk
2016
0:20 I am a prosecutor. I believe in law and order. I am the adopted son of a police officer, a Marine and a hairdresser. I believe in accountability and that we should all be safe in our communities. I love my job and the people that do it. I just think that it's our responsibility to do it better.
0:4 By a show of hands, how many of you, by the age of 25, had either acted up in school, went somewhere you were specifically told to stay out of, or drank alcohol before your legal age?
1:00 How many of you shoplifted, tried an illegal drug or got into a physical fight -- yes, even with a sibling? Now, how many of you ever spent one day in jail for any of those decisions? How many of you sitting here today think that you're a danger to society or should be defined by those actions of youthful indiscretion?
1:34When we talk about criminal justice reform, we often focus on a few things, and that's what I want to talk to you about today. But first I'm going to -- since you shared with me, I'm going to give you a confession on my part. I went to law school to make money. I had no interest in being a public servant, I had no interest in criminal law, and I definitely didn't think that I would ever be a prosecutor.
1:59Near the end of my first year of law school, I got an internship in the Roxbury Division of Boston Municipal Court. I knew of Roxbury as an impoverished neighborhood in Boston, plagued by gun violence and drug crime. My life and my legal career changed the first day of that internship. I walked into a courtroom, and I saw an auditorium of people who, one by one, would approach the front of that courtroom to say two words and two words only: "Not guilty." They were predominately black and brown. And then a judge, a defense attorney and a prosecutor would make life-altering decisions about that person without their input. They were predominately white. As each person, one by one, approached the front of that courtroom, I couldn't stop but think: How did they get here? I wanted to know their stories. And as the prosecutor read the facts of each case, I was thinking to myself, we could have predicted that. That seems so preventable... not because I was an expert in criminal law, but because it was common sense.
3:12Over the course of the internship, I began to recognize people in the auditorium, not because they were criminal masterminds but because they were coming to us for help and we were sending them out without any.
3:24My second year of law school I worked as a paralegal for a defense attorney, and in that experience I met many young men accused of murder. Even in our "worst," I saw human stories. And they all contained childhood trauma, victimization, poverty, loss, disengagement from school, early interaction with the police and the criminal justice system, all leading to a seat in a courtroom. Those convicted of murder were condemned to die in prison, and it was during those meetings with those men that I couldn't fathom why we would spend so much money to keep this one person in jail for the next 80 years when we could have reinvested it up front, and perhaps prevented the whole thing from happening in the first place.
4:06(Applause)
4:11My third year of law school, I defended people accused of small street crimes, mostly mentally ill, mostly homeless, mostly drug-addicted, all in need of help. They would come to us, and we would send them away without that help. They were in need of our assistance. But we weren't giving them any. Prosecuted, adjudged and defended by people who knew nothing about them.
4:43The staggering inefficiency is what drove me to criminal justice work. The unfairness of it all made me want to be a defender. The power dynamic that I came to understandmade me become a prosecutor.
4:58I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about the problem. We know the criminal justice system needs reform, we know there are 2.3 million people in American jails and prisons, making us the most incarcerated nation on the planet. We know there's another seven million people on probation or parole, we know that the criminal justice system disproportionately affects people of color, particularly poor people of color. And we know there are system failures happening everywhere that bring people to our courtrooms. But what we do not discuss is how ill-equipped our prosecutors are to receive them. When we talk about criminal justice reform, we, as a society, focus on three things. We complain, we tweet, we protest about the police, about sentencing laws and about prison. We rarely, if ever, talk about the prosecutor.
5:45In the fall of 2009, a young man was arrested by the Boston Police Department. He was 18 years old, he was African American and he was a senior at a local public school. He had his sights set on college but his part-time, minimum-wage job wasn't providing the financial opportunity he needed to enroll in school. In a series of bad decisions, he stole 30 laptops from a store and sold them on the Internet. This led to his arrest and a criminal complaint of 30 felony charges. The potential jail time he faced is what stressed Christopher out the most. But what he had little understanding of was the impact a criminal record would have on his future.
6:27I was standing in arraignments that day when Christopher's case came across my desk. And at the risk of sounding dramatic, in that moment, I had Christopher's life in my hands. I was 29 years old, a brand-new prosecutor, and I had little appreciation for how the decisions I would make would impact Christopher's life. Christopher's case was a serious one and it needed to be dealt with as such, but I didn't think branding him a felon for the rest of his life was the right answer.
6:55For the most part, prosecutors step onto the job with little appreciation of the impact of our decisions, regardless of our intent. Despite our broad discretion, we learn to avoid risk at all cost, rendering our discretion basically useless. History has conditioned us to believe that somehow, the criminal justice system brings about accountability and improves public safety, despite evidence to the contrary. We're judged internally and externally by our convictions and our trial wins, so prosecutors aren't really incentivized to be creative at our case dispositions, or to take risks on people we might not otherwise. We stick to an outdated method, counterproductive to achieving the very goal that we all want, and that's safer communities.
7:41Yet most prosecutors standing in my space would have arraigned Christopher. They have little appreciation for what we can do. Arraigning Christopher would give him a criminal record, making it harder for him to get a job, setting in motion a cycle that defines the failing criminal justice system today. With a criminal record and without a job, Christopher would be unable to find employment, education or stable housing. Without those protective factors in his life, Christopher would be more likely to commit further, more serious crime. The more contact Christopher had with the criminal justice system, the more likely it would be that he would return again and again and again -- all at tremendous social cost to his children, to his family and to his peers. And, ladies and gentlemen, it is a terrible public safety outcome for the rest of us.
8:35When I came out of law school, I did the same thing as everybody else. I came out as a prosecutor expected to do justice, but I never learned what justice was in my classes --none of us do. None of us do.
8:49And yet, prosecutors are the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system. Our power is virtually boundless. In most cases, not the judge, not the police, not the legislature, not the mayor, not the governor, not the President can tell us how to prosecute our cases. The decision to arraign Christopher and give him a criminal record was exclusively mine. I would choose whether to prosecute him for 30 felonies, for one felony, for a misdemeanor, or at all. I would choose whether to leverage Christopher into a plea deal or take the case to trial, and ultimately, I would be in a position to ask for Christopher to go to jail. These are decisions that prosecutors make every day unfettered, and we are unaware and untrained of the grave consequences of those decisions.
9:39One night this past summer, I was at a small gathering of professional men of color from around the city. As I stood there stuffing free finger sandwiches into my mouth, as you do as public servant --
9:50(Laughter)
9:51I noticed across the room, a young man waving and smiling at me and approaching me. And I recognized him, but I couldn't place from where, and before I knew it, this young man was hugging me. And thanking me. "You cared about me, and you changed my life." It was Christopher.
10:14See, I never arraigned Christopher. He never faced a judge or a jail, he never had a criminal record. Instead, I worked with Christopher; first on being accountable for his actions, and then, putting him in a position where he wouldn't re-offend. We recovered 75 percent of the computers that he sold and gave them back to Best Buy, and came up with a financial plan to repay for the computers we couldn't recover. Christopher did community service. He wrote an essay reflecting on how this case could impact his future and that of the community. He applied to college, he obtained financial aid, and he went on to graduate from a four-year school.
10:49(Applause)
10:56After we finished hugging, I looked at his name tag, to learn that Christopher was the manager of a large bank in Boston. Christopher had accomplished -- and making a lot more money than me --
11:05(Laughter)
11:06He had accomplished all of this in the six years since I had first seen him in Roxbury Court. I can't take credit for Christopher's journey to success, but I certainly did my part to keep him on the path.
11:19There are thousands of Christophers out there, some locked in our jails and prisons. We need thousands of prosecutors to recognize that and to protect them. An employed Christopher is better for public safety than a condemned one. It's a bigger win for all of us. In retrospect, the decision not to throw the book at Christopher makes perfect sense. When I saw him that first day in Roxbury Court, I didn't see a criminal standing there. I saw myself -- a young person in need of intervention. As an individual caught selling a large quantity of drugs in my late teens, I knew firsthand the power of opportunity as opposed to the wrath of the criminal justice system. Along the way, with the help and guidance of my district attorney, my supervisor and judges, I learned the power of the prosecutor to change lives instead of ruining them.
12:17And that's how we do it in Boston. We helped a woman who was arrested for stealing groceries to feed her kids get a job. Instead of putting an abused teenager in adult jail for punching another teenager, we secured mental health treatment and community supervision. A runaway girl who was arrested for prostituting, to survive on the streets, needed a safe place to live and grow -- something we could help her with. I even helped a young man who was so afraid of the older gang kids showing up after school, that one morning instead of a lunchbox into his backpack, he put a loaded 9-millimeter. We would spend our time that we'd normally take prepping our cases for months and months for trial down the road by coming up with real solutions to the problems as they presented.
13:03Which is the better way to spend our time? How would you prefer your prosecutors to spend theirs? Why are we spending 80 billion dollars on a prison industry that we know is failing, when we could take that money and reallocate it into education, into mental health treatment, into substance abuse treatment and to community investment so we can develop our neighborhoods?
13:25(Applause)
13:32So why should this matter to you? Well, one, we're spending a lot of money. Our money. It costs 109,000 dollars in some states to lock up a teenager for a year, with a 60 percent chance that that person will return to the very same system. That is a terrible return on investment.
13:53Number two: it's the right thing to do. If prosecutors were a part of creating the problem, it's incumbent on us to create a solution and we can do that using other disciplines that have already done the data and research for us.
14:05And number three: your voice and your vote can make that happen. The next time there's a local district attorney's election in your jurisdiction, ask candidates these questions. One: What are you doing to make me and my neighbors safer? Two: What data are you collecting, and how are you training your prosecutors to make sure that it's working? And number three: If it's not working for everybody, what are you doing to fix it? If they can't answer the questions, they shouldn't be doing the job.
14:34Each one of you that raised your hand at the beginning of this talk is a living, breathing example of the power of opportunity, of intervention, of support and of love. While each of you may have faced your own brand of discipline for whatever malfeasances you committed, barely any of you needed a day in jail to make you the people that you are today -- some of the greatest minds on the planet.
14:56Every day, thousands of times a day, prosecutors around the United States wield power so great that it can bring about catastrophe as quickly as it can bring about opportunity, intervention, support and yes, even love. Those qualities are the hallmarks of a strong community, and a strong community is a safe one. If our communities are broken, don't let the lawyers that you elect fix them with outdated, inefficient, expensive methods.
15:22Demand more; vote for the prosecutor who's helping people stay out of jail, not putting them in.
15:27
Demand better. You deserve it, your children deserve it, the people who are tied up in the system deserve it, but most of all, the people that we are sworn to protect and do justice for demand it.
Sir Ken Robinson Quotes
Sri Ken Robinson said, “If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” In other words, some people are so afraid of making a mistake, they will never try something new. Some people are so indoctrinated into doing things the same way, they will never come up with something new and fresh. For example, if the education system (education) as a whole continues to focus only on the what worked in the past, it will never come up with something new and exciting. Thus, if the education system continues to limit the available classes like automotive, wood working, and basic building/contracting, then many of the students who do not wish to delve into chemistry or American Literature will fall to the wayside. And, this falling to the wayside is exactly what can be the catalyst for many young individuals to become interested in a life of crime, drugs, and anti-social behavior. Robinson also said, “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.” In other words, if education continues to standardize education by teaching the same novels, the same subjects, and the same…................................ For example, if.............................
“Creativity is as important as literacy”
“Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.”
“For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail - it’s just the opposite - we aim too low and succeed.”
“Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”
“We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”
“Curiosity is the engine of achievement.” See Below
So…how can we get students to be curious…get them into the area of their expertise?
“We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.”
“When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don’t know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn’t really care.”
“Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”
“Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.”
“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability”
“The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.”
“Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.”
“What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.”
“The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.”
“young children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations ... Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up”
“You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.”
“We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness.”
“I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.”
“Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.”
“We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make -- and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
“To be creative you actually have to do something.”
“One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.”
“Sometimes getting away from school is the best thing can happen to a great mind.”
“Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of.”
“Inspire creativity in students”
Sri Ken Robinson said, “If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” In other words, some people are so afraid of making a mistake, they will never try something new. Some people are so indoctrinated into doing things the same way, they will never come up with something new and fresh. For example, if the education system (education) as a whole continues to focus only on the what worked in the past, it will never come up with something new and exciting. Thus, if the education system continues to limit the available classes like automotive, wood working, and basic building/contracting, then many of the students who do not wish to delve into chemistry or American Literature will fall to the wayside. And, this falling to the wayside is exactly what can be the catalyst for many young individuals to become interested in a life of crime, drugs, and anti-social behavior. Robinson also said, “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn't need to be reformed -- it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.” In other words, if education continues to standardize education by teaching the same novels, the same subjects, and the same…................................ For example, if.............................
“Creativity is as important as literacy”
“Human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.”
“For most of us the problem isn’t that we aim too high and fail - it’s just the opposite - we aim too low and succeed.”
“Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it's the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”
“We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”
“Curiosity is the engine of achievement.” See Below
So…how can we get students to be curious…get them into the area of their expertise?
“We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.”
“When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don’t know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn’t really care.”
“Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”
“Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.”
“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent not a singular conception of ability”
“The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.”
“Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.”
“What you do for yourself dies with you when you leave this world, what you do for others lives on forever.”
“The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.”
“young children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations ... Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up”
“You cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do is like a farmer create the conditions under which it will begin to flourish.”
“We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness.”
“I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.”
“Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.”
“We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make -- and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
“To be creative you actually have to do something.”
“One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.”
“Sometimes getting away from school is the best thing can happen to a great mind.”
“Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of.”
“Inspire creativity in students”
Ismael Nazario
“What I Learned as A Kid in Jail”
2014
TED Talk
We need to change the culture in our jails and prisons, especially for young inmates. New York state is one of only two in the U.S. that automatically arrests and tries 16- to 17-year-olds as adults. This culture of violence takes these young people and puts them in a hostile environment, and the correctional officers pretty much allow any and everything to go on. There's not really much for these young people to do to actually enhance their talent and actually rehabilitate them. Until we can raise the age of criminal responsibility to 18, we need to focus on changing the daily lives of these young people.
0:49I know firsthand. Before I ever turned 18, I spent approximately 400 days on Rikers Island, and to add to that I spent almost 300 days in solitary confinement, and let me tell you this: Screaming at the top of your lungs all day on your cell door or screaming at the top of your lungs out the window, it gets tiring. Since there's not much for you to do while you're in there, you start pacing back and forth in your cell, you start talking to yourself, your thoughts start running wild, and then your thoughts become your own worst enemy. Jails are actually supposed to rehabilitate a person, not cause him or her to become angrier, frustrated, and feel more hopeless. Since there's not a discharge plan put in place for these young people, they pretty much reenter society with nothing. And there's not really much for them to do to keep them from recidivating.
1:46But it all starts with the C.O.s. It's very easy for some people to look at these correctional officers as the good guys and the inmates as the bad guys, or vice versa for some, but it's a little more than that. See, these C.O.s are normal, everyday people. They come from the same neighborhoods as the population they "serve." They're just normal people. They're not robots, and there's nothing special about them. They do pretty much everything anybody else in society does. The male C.O.s want to talk and flirt with the female C.O.s. They play the little high school kid games with each other. They politic with one another. And the female C.O.s gossip to each other.
2:30So I spent numerous amounts of time with numerous amounts of C.O.s, and let me tell you about this one in particular named Monroe. One day he pulled me in between the A and B doors which separate the north and south sides of our housing unit. He pulled me there because I had a physical altercation with another young man in my housing unit, and he felt, since there was a female officer working on the floor, that I violated his shift. So he punched me in my chest. He kind of knocked the wind out of me. I wasn't impulsive, I didn't react right away, because I know this is their house. I have no wins. All he has to do is pull his pin and backup will come immediately. So I just gave him a look in his eyes and I guess he saw the anger and frustration just burning, and he said to me, "Your eyes are going to get you in a lot of trouble, because you're looking like you want to fight." So he commenced to taking off his utility belt, he took off his shirt and his badge, and he said, "We could fight."
3:33So I asked him, "You gonna hold it down?" Now, that's a term that's commonly used on Rikers Island meaning that you're not going to say anything to anybody, and you're not going to report it. He said, "Yeah, I'm gonna hold it down. You gonna hold it down?" I didn't even respond. I just punched him right in his face, and we began fighting right then and there.
3:54Towards the end of the fight, he slammed me up against the wall, so while we were tussled up, he said to me, "You good?" as if he got the best of me, but in my mind, I know I got the best of him, so I replied very cocky, "Oh, I'm good, you good?" He said, "Yeah, I'm good, I'm good." We let go, he shook my hand, said he gave me my respect, gave me a cigarette and sent me on my way.
4:20Believe it or not, you come across some C.O.s on Rikers Island that'll fight you one-on-one. They feel that they understand how it is, and they feel that I'm going to meet you where you're at. Since this is how you commonly handle your disputes, we can handle it in that manner. I walk away from it like a man, you walk away from it like a man, and that's it. Some C.O.s feel that they're jailing with you. This is why they have that mentality and that attitude and they go by that concept. In some instances, we're in it together with the C.O.s. However,
institutions need to give these correctional officers proper trainings on how to properly deal with the adolescent population, and they also need to give them proper trainings on how to deal with the mental health population as well. These C.O.s play a big factor in these young people's lives for x amount of time until a disposition is reached on their case. So why not try to mentor these young people while they're there? Why not try to give them some type of insight to make a change, so once they reenter back into society, they're doing something positive?
5:27A second big thing to help our teens in jails is better programming. When I was on Rikers Island, the huge thing was solitary confinement. Solitary confinement was originally designed to break a person mentally, physically and emotionally. That's what it was designed for. The U.S. Attorney General recently released a report stating that they're going to ban solitary confinement in New York state for teens.
5:54One thing that kept me sane while I was in solitary confinement was reading. I tried to educate myself as much as possible. I read any and everything I could get my hands on. And aside from that, I wrote music and short stories.
Some programs that I feel would benefit our young people are art therapy programs for the kids that like to draw and have that talent, and what about the young individuals that are musically inclined? How about a music program for them that actually teaches them how to write and make music? Just a thought.
6:29When adolescents come to Rikers Island, C74, RNDC is the building that they're housed in. That's nicknamed "gladiator school," because you have a young individual coming in from the street thinking that they're tough, being surrounded by a bunch of other young individuals from all of the five boroughs, and everybody feels that they're tough. So now you have a bunch of young gentlemen poking their chests out feeling that I have to prove I'm equally as tough as you or I'm tougher than you, you and you.But let's be honest: That culture is very dangerous and damaging to our young people.We need to help institutions and these teens realize that they don't have to lead the previous lifestyle that they led when they were on the street, that they can actually make a change.
7:17It's sad to report that while I was in prison, I used to hear dudes talking about when they get released from prison, what type of crimes they're going to commit when they get back in the street. The conversations used to sound something like this: "Oh, when I hit the street, my brother got this connection for this, that and the third," or, "My man over here got this connection for the low price. Let's exchange information," and, "When we hit the town, we're going to do it real big." I used to hear these conversations and think to myself, "Wow, these dudes are really talking about going back in the street and committing future crimes." So I came up with a name for that: I called it a go-back-to-jail-quick scheme because really, how long is that going to last? You get a retirement plan with that? Nice little pension? 401(k)? 403(b)? You get health insurance? Dental? (Laughter)
8:12But I will tell you this: Being in jail and being in prison, I came across some of the most intelligent, brilliant, and talented people that I would ever meet. I've seen individuals take a potato chip bag and turn it into the most beautiful picture frame. I've seen individuals take the state soap that's provided for free and turn them into the most beautiful sculptures that would make Michelangelo look like a kindergartner made it.
8:37At the age of 21, I was in a maximum-security prison called Elmira Correctional Facility. I just came out of the weight shack from working out, and I saw an older gentleman that I knew standing in the middle of the yard just looking up at the sky. Mind you, this older gentlemen was serving a 33-and-a-third-to-life sentence in which he already had served 20 years of that sentence.
8:57So I walk up to him and I said, "O.G., what's going on, man, you good?"
9:00He looked at me, and he said, "Yeah, I'm good, young blood."
9:03I'm like, "So what are you looking up at the sky for, man? What's so fascinating up there?"
9:08He said, "You look up and you tell me what you see."
9:12"Clouds." (Laughter)
9:15He said, "All right. What else do you see?" At that time, it was a plane passing by.
9:21I said, "All right, I see an airplane."
9:23He said, "Exactly, and what's on that airplane?" "People." "Exactly. Now where's that plane and those people going?"
9:31"I don't know. You know? Please let me know if you do. Then let me get some lottery numbers."
9:37He said, "You're missing the big picture, young blood. That plane with those people is going somewhere, while we're here stuck. The big picture is this: That plane with those people going somewhere, that's life passing us by while we behind these walls, stuck."
9:57Ever since that day, that sparked something in my mind and made me know I had to make a change. Growing up, I was always a good, smart kid.
Some people would say I was a little too smart for my own good. I had dreams of becoming an architect or an archaeologist.
10:17Currently, I'm working at the Fortune Society, which is a reentry program, and I work with people as a case manager that are at high risk for recidivism. So I connect them with the services that they need once they're released from jail and prison so they can make a positive transition back into society.
If I was to see my 15-year-old self today, I would sit down and talk to him and try to educate him and I would let him know, "Listen, this is me. I'm you. This is us. We are one. Everything that you're about to do, I know what you're gonna do before you do it because I already did it, and I would encourage him not to hang out with x, y and z people. I would tell him not to be in such-and-such place. I would tell him, keep your behind in school, man, because that's where you need to be, because that's what's going to get you somewhere in life. This is the message that we should be sharing with our young men and young women. We shouldn't be treating them as adults and putting them in cultures of violence that are nearly impossible for them to escape.
11:15Thank you.
Ismael Nazario
“What I Learned as A Kid in Jail”
2014
TED Talk
We need to change the culture in our jails and prisons, especially for young inmates. New York state is one of only two in the U.S. that automatically arrests and tries 16- to 17-year-olds as adults. This culture of violence takes these young people and puts them in a hostile environment, and the correctional officers pretty much allow any and everything to go on. There's not really much for these young people to do to actually enhance their talent and actually rehabilitate them. Until we can raise the age of criminal responsibility to 18, we need to focus on changing the daily lives of these young people.
0:49I know firsthand. Before I ever turned 18, I spent approximately 400 days on Rikers Island, and to add to that I spent almost 300 days in solitary confinement, and let me tell you this: Screaming at the top of your lungs all day on your cell door or screaming at the top of your lungs out the window, it gets tiring. Since there's not much for you to do while you're in there, you start pacing back and forth in your cell, you start talking to yourself, your thoughts start running wild, and then your thoughts become your own worst enemy. Jails are actually supposed to rehabilitate a person, not cause him or her to become angrier, frustrated, and feel more hopeless. Since there's not a discharge plan put in place for these young people, they pretty much reenter society with nothing. And there's not really much for them to do to keep them from recidivating.
1:46But it all starts with the C.O.s. It's very easy for some people to look at these correctional officers as the good guys and the inmates as the bad guys, or vice versa for some, but it's a little more than that. See, these C.O.s are normal, everyday people. They come from the same neighborhoods as the population they "serve." They're just normal people. They're not robots, and there's nothing special about them. They do pretty much everything anybody else in society does. The male C.O.s want to talk and flirt with the female C.O.s. They play the little high school kid games with each other. They politic with one another. And the female C.O.s gossip to each other.
2:30So I spent numerous amounts of time with numerous amounts of C.O.s, and let me tell you about this one in particular named Monroe. One day he pulled me in between the A and B doors which separate the north and south sides of our housing unit. He pulled me there because I had a physical altercation with another young man in my housing unit, and he felt, since there was a female officer working on the floor, that I violated his shift. So he punched me in my chest. He kind of knocked the wind out of me. I wasn't impulsive, I didn't react right away, because I know this is their house. I have no wins. All he has to do is pull his pin and backup will come immediately. So I just gave him a look in his eyes and I guess he saw the anger and frustration just burning, and he said to me, "Your eyes are going to get you in a lot of trouble, because you're looking like you want to fight." So he commenced to taking off his utility belt, he took off his shirt and his badge, and he said, "We could fight."
3:33So I asked him, "You gonna hold it down?" Now, that's a term that's commonly used on Rikers Island meaning that you're not going to say anything to anybody, and you're not going to report it. He said, "Yeah, I'm gonna hold it down. You gonna hold it down?" I didn't even respond. I just punched him right in his face, and we began fighting right then and there.
3:54Towards the end of the fight, he slammed me up against the wall, so while we were tussled up, he said to me, "You good?" as if he got the best of me, but in my mind, I know I got the best of him, so I replied very cocky, "Oh, I'm good, you good?" He said, "Yeah, I'm good, I'm good." We let go, he shook my hand, said he gave me my respect, gave me a cigarette and sent me on my way.
4:20Believe it or not, you come across some C.O.s on Rikers Island that'll fight you one-on-one. They feel that they understand how it is, and they feel that I'm going to meet you where you're at. Since this is how you commonly handle your disputes, we can handle it in that manner. I walk away from it like a man, you walk away from it like a man, and that's it. Some C.O.s feel that they're jailing with you. This is why they have that mentality and that attitude and they go by that concept. In some instances, we're in it together with the C.O.s. However,
institutions need to give these correctional officers proper trainings on how to properly deal with the adolescent population, and they also need to give them proper trainings on how to deal with the mental health population as well. These C.O.s play a big factor in these young people's lives for x amount of time until a disposition is reached on their case. So why not try to mentor these young people while they're there? Why not try to give them some type of insight to make a change, so once they reenter back into society, they're doing something positive?
5:27A second big thing to help our teens in jails is better programming. When I was on Rikers Island, the huge thing was solitary confinement. Solitary confinement was originally designed to break a person mentally, physically and emotionally. That's what it was designed for. The U.S. Attorney General recently released a report stating that they're going to ban solitary confinement in New York state for teens.
5:54One thing that kept me sane while I was in solitary confinement was reading. I tried to educate myself as much as possible. I read any and everything I could get my hands on. And aside from that, I wrote music and short stories.
Some programs that I feel would benefit our young people are art therapy programs for the kids that like to draw and have that talent, and what about the young individuals that are musically inclined? How about a music program for them that actually teaches them how to write and make music? Just a thought.
6:29When adolescents come to Rikers Island, C74, RNDC is the building that they're housed in. That's nicknamed "gladiator school," because you have a young individual coming in from the street thinking that they're tough, being surrounded by a bunch of other young individuals from all of the five boroughs, and everybody feels that they're tough. So now you have a bunch of young gentlemen poking their chests out feeling that I have to prove I'm equally as tough as you or I'm tougher than you, you and you.But let's be honest: That culture is very dangerous and damaging to our young people.We need to help institutions and these teens realize that they don't have to lead the previous lifestyle that they led when they were on the street, that they can actually make a change.
7:17It's sad to report that while I was in prison, I used to hear dudes talking about when they get released from prison, what type of crimes they're going to commit when they get back in the street. The conversations used to sound something like this: "Oh, when I hit the street, my brother got this connection for this, that and the third," or, "My man over here got this connection for the low price. Let's exchange information," and, "When we hit the town, we're going to do it real big." I used to hear these conversations and think to myself, "Wow, these dudes are really talking about going back in the street and committing future crimes." So I came up with a name for that: I called it a go-back-to-jail-quick scheme because really, how long is that going to last? You get a retirement plan with that? Nice little pension? 401(k)? 403(b)? You get health insurance? Dental? (Laughter)
8:12But I will tell you this: Being in jail and being in prison, I came across some of the most intelligent, brilliant, and talented people that I would ever meet. I've seen individuals take a potato chip bag and turn it into the most beautiful picture frame. I've seen individuals take the state soap that's provided for free and turn them into the most beautiful sculptures that would make Michelangelo look like a kindergartner made it.
8:37At the age of 21, I was in a maximum-security prison called Elmira Correctional Facility. I just came out of the weight shack from working out, and I saw an older gentleman that I knew standing in the middle of the yard just looking up at the sky. Mind you, this older gentlemen was serving a 33-and-a-third-to-life sentence in which he already had served 20 years of that sentence.
8:57So I walk up to him and I said, "O.G., what's going on, man, you good?"
9:00He looked at me, and he said, "Yeah, I'm good, young blood."
9:03I'm like, "So what are you looking up at the sky for, man? What's so fascinating up there?"
9:08He said, "You look up and you tell me what you see."
9:12"Clouds." (Laughter)
9:15He said, "All right. What else do you see?" At that time, it was a plane passing by.
9:21I said, "All right, I see an airplane."
9:23He said, "Exactly, and what's on that airplane?" "People." "Exactly. Now where's that plane and those people going?"
9:31"I don't know. You know? Please let me know if you do. Then let me get some lottery numbers."
9:37He said, "You're missing the big picture, young blood. That plane with those people is going somewhere, while we're here stuck. The big picture is this: That plane with those people going somewhere, that's life passing us by while we behind these walls, stuck."
9:57Ever since that day, that sparked something in my mind and made me know I had to make a change. Growing up, I was always a good, smart kid.
Some people would say I was a little too smart for my own good. I had dreams of becoming an architect or an archaeologist.
10:17Currently, I'm working at the Fortune Society, which is a reentry program, and I work with people as a case manager that are at high risk for recidivism. So I connect them with the services that they need once they're released from jail and prison so they can make a positive transition back into society.
If I was to see my 15-year-old self today, I would sit down and talk to him and try to educate him and I would let him know, "Listen, this is me. I'm you. This is us. We are one. Everything that you're about to do, I know what you're gonna do before you do it because I already did it, and I would encourage him not to hang out with x, y and z people. I would tell him not to be in such-and-such place. I would tell him, keep your behind in school, man, because that's where you need to be, because that's what's going to get you somewhere in life. This is the message that we should be sharing with our young men and young women. We shouldn't be treating them as adults and putting them in cultures of violence that are nearly impossible for them to escape.
11:15Thank you.
Shane Koyczan
Twed Talk
There's so many of you.
00:24When I was a kid, I hid my heart under the bed, because my mother said, "If you're not careful, someday someone's going to break it." Take it from me: Under the bed is not a good hiding spot. I know because I've been shot down so many times, I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself. But that's what we were told. "Stand up for yourself." And that's hard to do if you don't know who you are. We were expected to define ourselves at such an early age, and if we didn't do it, others did it for us. Geek. Fatty. Slut. Fag.
01:01And at the same time we were being told what we were, we were being asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I always thought that was an unfair question. It presupposes that we can't be what we already are. We were kids.
01:17When I was a kid, I wanted to be a man. I wanted a registered retirement savings plan that would keep me in candy long enough to make old age sweet.
01:26When I was a kid, I wanted to shave. Now, not so much.
01:32When I was eight, I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I was nine, I saw the movie "Jaws," and thought to myself, "No, thank you."
01:41And when I was 10, I was told that my parents left because they didn't want me. When I was 11, I wanted to be left alone. When I was 12, I wanted to die. When I was 13, I wanted to kill a kid. When I was 14, I was asked to seriously consider a career path.
01:55I said, "I'd like to be a writer."
01:57And they said, "Choose something realistic."
02:00So I said, "Professional wrestler."
02:03And they said, "Don't be stupid."
02:06See, they asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be.
02:11And I wasn't the only one. We were being told that we somehow must become what we are not, sacrificing what we are to inherit the masquerade of what we will be. I was being told to accept the identity that others will give me.
02:25And I wondered, what made my dreams so easy to dismiss? Granted, my dreams are shy,because they're Canadian.
02:37My dreams are self-conscious and overly apologetic. They're standing alone at the high school dance, and they've never been kissed. See, my dreams got called names too. Silly. Foolish. Impossible. But I kept dreaming. I was going to be a wrestler. I had it all figured out. I was going to be The Garbage Man.
02:59My finishing move was going to be The Trash Compactor. My saying was going to be, "I'm taking out the trash!"
03:12And then this guy, Duke "The Dumpster" Droese, stole my entire shtick.
03:20I was crushed, as if by a trash compactor.
03:27I thought to myself, "What now? Where do I turn?"
03:31Poetry.
03:32(Laughter)
03:33Like a boomerang, the thing I loved came back to me. One of the first lines of poetry I can remember writing was in response to a world that demanded I hate myself. From age 15 to 18, I hated myself for becoming the thing that I loathed: a bully.
03:49When I was 19, I wrote, "I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite."
03:58Standing up for yourself doesn't have to mean embracing violence.
04:03When I was a kid, I traded in homework assignments for friendship, then gave each friend a late slip for never showing up on time, and in most cases, not at all. I gave myself a hall pass to get through each broken promise. And I remember this plan, born out of frustration from a kid who kept calling me "Yogi," then pointed at my tummy and said, "Too many picnic baskets." Turns out it's not that hard to trick someone, and one day before class, I said,"Yeah, you can copy my homework," and I gave him all the wrong answers that I'd written down the night before. He got his paper back expecting a near-perfect score, and couldn't believe it when he looked across the room at me and held up a zero. I knew I didn't have to hold up my paper of 28 out of 30, but my satisfaction was complete when he looked at me, puzzled, and I thought to myself, "Smarter than the average bear, motherfucker."
04:58This is who I am. This is how I stand up for myself.
05:05When I was a kid, I used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing. I thought they were both pork chops. My grandmother thought it was cute, and because they were my favorite, she let me keep doing it. Not really a big deal. One day, before I realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees, I fell out of a tree and bruised the right side of my body. I didn't want to tell my grandmother because I was scared I'd get in trouble for playing somewhere I shouldn't have been. The gym teacher noticed the bruise, and I got sent to the principal's office. From there, I was sent to another small room with a really nice lady who asked me all kinds of questions about my life at home. I saw no reason to lie. As far as I was concerned, life was pretty good. I told her, whenever I'm sad, my grandmother gives me karate chops.
05:52(Laughter)
06:00This led to a full-scale investigation, and I was removed from the house for three days, until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises. News of this silly little story quickly spread through the school, and I earned my first nickname: Porkchop. To this day, I hate pork chops.
06:24I'm not the only kid who grew up this way, surrounded by people who used to say that rhymeabout sticks and stones, as if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called, and we got called them all. So we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us, that we'd be lonely forever, that we'd never meet someone to make us feel like the sun was something they built for us in their toolshed. So broken heartstrings bled the blues, and we tried to empty ourselves so we'd feel nothing. Don't tell me that hurts less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize; it does.
07:00She was eight years old, our first day of grade three when she got called ugly. We both got moved to the back of class so we would stop getting bombarded by spitballs. But the school halls were a battleground. We found ourselves outnumbered day after wretched day. We used to stay inside for recess, because outside was worse. Outside, we'd have to rehearse running away, or learn to stay still like statues, giving no clues that we were there. In grade five, they taped a sign to the front of her desk that read, "Beware of dog."
07:29To this day, despite a loving husband, she doesn't think she's beautiful, because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face. Kids used to say, "She looks like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase, but couldn't quite get the job done." And they'll never understand that she's raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word "Mom," because they see her heart before they see her skin, because she's only ever always been amazing.
07:56He was a broken branch grafted onto a different family tree, adopted, not because his parents opted for a different destiny. He was three when he became a mixed drink of one part left alone and two parts tragedy, started therapy in eighth grade, had a personality made up of tests and pills, lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs, four-fifths suicidal, a tidal wave of antidepressants, and an adolescent being called "Popper," one part because of the pills, 99 parts because of the cruelty. He tried to kill himself in grade 10 when a kid who could still go home to Mom and Dad had the audacity to tell him, "Get over it." As if depression is something that could be remedied by any of the contents found in a first-aid kit.
08:45To this day, he is a stick of TNT lit from both ends, could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends in the moment before it's about to fall, and despite an army of friends who all call him an inspiration, he remains a conversation piece between people who can't understandsometimes being drug-free has less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity.
09:05We weren't the only kids who grew up this way. To this day, kids are still being called names.The classics were "Hey, stupid," "Hey, spaz." Seems like every school has an arsenal of names getting updated every year. And if a kid breaks in a school and no one around chooses to hear, do they make a sound? Are they just background noise from a soundtrack stuck on repeat, when people say things like, "Kids can be cruel." Every school was a big top circus tent, and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers, from clowns to carnies, all of these miles ahead of who we were. We were freaks -- lobster-claw boys and bearded ladies,oddities juggling depression and loneliness, playing solitaire, spin the bottle, trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal, but at night, while the others slept, we kept walking the tightrope. It was practice, and yes, some of us fell.
10:03But I want to tell them that all of this is just debris left over when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be, and if you can't see anything beautiful about yourself,get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer, because there's something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit. You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself, "They were wrong." Because maybe you didn't belong to a group or a clique. Maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything. Maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth to show-and-tell, but never told, because how can you hold your ground if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it? You have to believe that they were wrong. They have to be wrong. Why else would we still be here?
10:54We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them. We stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called. We are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting empty on some highway, and if in some way we are, don't worry.We only got out to walk and get gas. We are graduating members from the class of We Made It, not the faded echoes of voices crying out, "Names will never hurt me." Of course they did.
11:27But our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with painand more to do with beauty.
Twed Talk
There's so many of you.
00:24When I was a kid, I hid my heart under the bed, because my mother said, "If you're not careful, someday someone's going to break it." Take it from me: Under the bed is not a good hiding spot. I know because I've been shot down so many times, I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself. But that's what we were told. "Stand up for yourself." And that's hard to do if you don't know who you are. We were expected to define ourselves at such an early age, and if we didn't do it, others did it for us. Geek. Fatty. Slut. Fag.
01:01And at the same time we were being told what we were, we were being asked, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I always thought that was an unfair question. It presupposes that we can't be what we already are. We were kids.
01:17When I was a kid, I wanted to be a man. I wanted a registered retirement savings plan that would keep me in candy long enough to make old age sweet.
01:26When I was a kid, I wanted to shave. Now, not so much.
01:32When I was eight, I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I was nine, I saw the movie "Jaws," and thought to myself, "No, thank you."
01:41And when I was 10, I was told that my parents left because they didn't want me. When I was 11, I wanted to be left alone. When I was 12, I wanted to die. When I was 13, I wanted to kill a kid. When I was 14, I was asked to seriously consider a career path.
01:55I said, "I'd like to be a writer."
01:57And they said, "Choose something realistic."
02:00So I said, "Professional wrestler."
02:03And they said, "Don't be stupid."
02:06See, they asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be.
02:11And I wasn't the only one. We were being told that we somehow must become what we are not, sacrificing what we are to inherit the masquerade of what we will be. I was being told to accept the identity that others will give me.
02:25And I wondered, what made my dreams so easy to dismiss? Granted, my dreams are shy,because they're Canadian.
02:37My dreams are self-conscious and overly apologetic. They're standing alone at the high school dance, and they've never been kissed. See, my dreams got called names too. Silly. Foolish. Impossible. But I kept dreaming. I was going to be a wrestler. I had it all figured out. I was going to be The Garbage Man.
02:59My finishing move was going to be The Trash Compactor. My saying was going to be, "I'm taking out the trash!"
03:12And then this guy, Duke "The Dumpster" Droese, stole my entire shtick.
03:20I was crushed, as if by a trash compactor.
03:27I thought to myself, "What now? Where do I turn?"
03:31Poetry.
03:32(Laughter)
03:33Like a boomerang, the thing I loved came back to me. One of the first lines of poetry I can remember writing was in response to a world that demanded I hate myself. From age 15 to 18, I hated myself for becoming the thing that I loathed: a bully.
03:49When I was 19, I wrote, "I will love myself despite the ease with which I lean toward the opposite."
03:58Standing up for yourself doesn't have to mean embracing violence.
04:03When I was a kid, I traded in homework assignments for friendship, then gave each friend a late slip for never showing up on time, and in most cases, not at all. I gave myself a hall pass to get through each broken promise. And I remember this plan, born out of frustration from a kid who kept calling me "Yogi," then pointed at my tummy and said, "Too many picnic baskets." Turns out it's not that hard to trick someone, and one day before class, I said,"Yeah, you can copy my homework," and I gave him all the wrong answers that I'd written down the night before. He got his paper back expecting a near-perfect score, and couldn't believe it when he looked across the room at me and held up a zero. I knew I didn't have to hold up my paper of 28 out of 30, but my satisfaction was complete when he looked at me, puzzled, and I thought to myself, "Smarter than the average bear, motherfucker."
04:58This is who I am. This is how I stand up for myself.
05:05When I was a kid, I used to think that pork chops and karate chops were the same thing. I thought they were both pork chops. My grandmother thought it was cute, and because they were my favorite, she let me keep doing it. Not really a big deal. One day, before I realized fat kids are not designed to climb trees, I fell out of a tree and bruised the right side of my body. I didn't want to tell my grandmother because I was scared I'd get in trouble for playing somewhere I shouldn't have been. The gym teacher noticed the bruise, and I got sent to the principal's office. From there, I was sent to another small room with a really nice lady who asked me all kinds of questions about my life at home. I saw no reason to lie. As far as I was concerned, life was pretty good. I told her, whenever I'm sad, my grandmother gives me karate chops.
05:52(Laughter)
06:00This led to a full-scale investigation, and I was removed from the house for three days, until they finally decided to ask how I got the bruises. News of this silly little story quickly spread through the school, and I earned my first nickname: Porkchop. To this day, I hate pork chops.
06:24I'm not the only kid who grew up this way, surrounded by people who used to say that rhymeabout sticks and stones, as if broken bones hurt more than the names we got called, and we got called them all. So we grew up believing no one would ever fall in love with us, that we'd be lonely forever, that we'd never meet someone to make us feel like the sun was something they built for us in their toolshed. So broken heartstrings bled the blues, and we tried to empty ourselves so we'd feel nothing. Don't tell me that hurts less than a broken bone, that an ingrown life is something surgeons can cut away, that there's no way for it to metastasize; it does.
07:00She was eight years old, our first day of grade three when she got called ugly. We both got moved to the back of class so we would stop getting bombarded by spitballs. But the school halls were a battleground. We found ourselves outnumbered day after wretched day. We used to stay inside for recess, because outside was worse. Outside, we'd have to rehearse running away, or learn to stay still like statues, giving no clues that we were there. In grade five, they taped a sign to the front of her desk that read, "Beware of dog."
07:29To this day, despite a loving husband, she doesn't think she's beautiful, because of a birthmark that takes up a little less than half her face. Kids used to say, "She looks like a wrong answer that someone tried to erase, but couldn't quite get the job done." And they'll never understand that she's raising two kids whose definition of beauty begins with the word "Mom," because they see her heart before they see her skin, because she's only ever always been amazing.
07:56He was a broken branch grafted onto a different family tree, adopted, not because his parents opted for a different destiny. He was three when he became a mixed drink of one part left alone and two parts tragedy, started therapy in eighth grade, had a personality made up of tests and pills, lived like the uphills were mountains and the downhills were cliffs, four-fifths suicidal, a tidal wave of antidepressants, and an adolescent being called "Popper," one part because of the pills, 99 parts because of the cruelty. He tried to kill himself in grade 10 when a kid who could still go home to Mom and Dad had the audacity to tell him, "Get over it." As if depression is something that could be remedied by any of the contents found in a first-aid kit.
08:45To this day, he is a stick of TNT lit from both ends, could describe to you in detail the way the sky bends in the moment before it's about to fall, and despite an army of friends who all call him an inspiration, he remains a conversation piece between people who can't understandsometimes being drug-free has less to do with addiction and more to do with sanity.
09:05We weren't the only kids who grew up this way. To this day, kids are still being called names.The classics were "Hey, stupid," "Hey, spaz." Seems like every school has an arsenal of names getting updated every year. And if a kid breaks in a school and no one around chooses to hear, do they make a sound? Are they just background noise from a soundtrack stuck on repeat, when people say things like, "Kids can be cruel." Every school was a big top circus tent, and the pecking order went from acrobats to lion tamers, from clowns to carnies, all of these miles ahead of who we were. We were freaks -- lobster-claw boys and bearded ladies,oddities juggling depression and loneliness, playing solitaire, spin the bottle, trying to kiss the wounded parts of ourselves and heal, but at night, while the others slept, we kept walking the tightrope. It was practice, and yes, some of us fell.
10:03But I want to tell them that all of this is just debris left over when we finally decide to smash all the things we thought we used to be, and if you can't see anything beautiful about yourself,get a better mirror, look a little closer, stare a little longer, because there's something inside you that made you keep trying despite everyone who told you to quit. You built a cast around your broken heart and signed it yourself, "They were wrong." Because maybe you didn't belong to a group or a clique. Maybe they decided to pick you last for basketball or everything. Maybe you used to bring bruises and broken teeth to show-and-tell, but never told, because how can you hold your ground if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it? You have to believe that they were wrong. They have to be wrong. Why else would we still be here?
10:54We grew up learning to cheer on the underdog because we see ourselves in them. We stem from a root planted in the belief that we are not what we were called. We are not abandoned cars stalled out and sitting empty on some highway, and if in some way we are, don't worry.We only got out to walk and get gas. We are graduating members from the class of We Made It, not the faded echoes of voices crying out, "Names will never hurt me." Of course they did.
11:27But our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with painand more to do with beauty.
Alice Goffman Ted Talk 2015
As an undergraduate studying sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Alice Goffman was inspired to write her senior thesis about the lives of the young people living in the historic African-American neighborhood that surrounded the school. She lived side-by-side with a group of young men in one of the US’s most distressed communities, experiencing a troubling and rarely discussed side of urban policing -- the beatings, late night raids and body searches that systematically pit young men against authority.
Goffman spent six years in the community, the work transforming into her dissertation at Princeton and then into the book, On the Run. In it, Goffman weaves groundbreaking research into a narrative amplifying neglected and often-ignored voices into a stirring, personal indictment of the social, economic and political forces that unwittingly conspire to push entire communities to the margins of society.
Goffman is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a vocal advocate for change in America.
Prison: the other college? “On the path that American children travel to adulthood, two institutions oversee the journey: the first one we hear a lot about, college,” says sociologist Alice Goffman. The second? Prison. “Young people on this journey are meeting with probation officers instead of teachers, going to court dates instead of class, their junior year abroad is a trip to state correctional facility … They’re emerging from their 20s with criminal records.” In the past 40 years, the incarceration rate in the United States has grown by 700%, says Goffman, and so more young people — mostly from African American and Latino communities — are on this path. For six years while getting her undergrad and grad degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, Goffman lived in a troubled Philly neighborhood. She saw firsthand just how easily the little mistakes of youth land people in these communities on the path to prison. “We are asking kids who live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, who are facing the toughest times … we are asking them to never do anything wrong,” says Goffman. “Why are we offering only handcuffs and jail time?” Goffman is happy to see a movement building toward the end of mass incarceration, and urges us to continue to see incarceration as a civil rights issue.
As an undergraduate studying sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, Alice Goffman was inspired to write her senior thesis about the lives of the young people living in the historic African-American neighborhood that surrounded the school. She lived side-by-side with a group of young men in one of the US’s most distressed communities, experiencing a troubling and rarely discussed side of urban policing -- the beatings, late night raids and body searches that systematically pit young men against authority.
Goffman spent six years in the community, the work transforming into her dissertation at Princeton and then into the book, On the Run. In it, Goffman weaves groundbreaking research into a narrative amplifying neglected and often-ignored voices into a stirring, personal indictment of the social, economic and political forces that unwittingly conspire to push entire communities to the margins of society.
Goffman is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a vocal advocate for change in America.
Prison: the other college? “On the path that American children travel to adulthood, two institutions oversee the journey: the first one we hear a lot about, college,” says sociologist Alice Goffman. The second? Prison. “Young people on this journey are meeting with probation officers instead of teachers, going to court dates instead of class, their junior year abroad is a trip to state correctional facility … They’re emerging from their 20s with criminal records.” In the past 40 years, the incarceration rate in the United States has grown by 700%, says Goffman, and so more young people — mostly from African American and Latino communities — are on this path. For six years while getting her undergrad and grad degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, Goffman lived in a troubled Philly neighborhood. She saw firsthand just how easily the little mistakes of youth land people in these communities on the path to prison. “We are asking kids who live in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, who are facing the toughest times … we are asking them to never do anything wrong,” says Goffman. “Why are we offering only handcuffs and jail time?” Goffman is happy to see a movement building toward the end of mass incarceration, and urges us to continue to see incarceration as a civil rights issue.
Sam Richards:
A radical experiment in empathy
TEDxPSU · 18:07 · Filmed Oct 2010
0:11My students often ask me, "What is sociology?" And I tell them, "It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see." And they say, "So how can I be a sociologist? How can I understand those invisible forces?" And I say, "Empathy. Start with empathy. It all begins with empathy. Take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person."
0:40Here, I'll give you an example. So I imagine my life: if a hundred years ago China had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the United States in search of coal, and they found it, and, in fact, they found lots of it right here. And pretty soon, they began shipping that coal, ton by ton, rail car by rail car, boatload by boatload, back to China and elsewhere around the world. And they got fabulously wealthy in doing so. And they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal. And back here in the United States, we saw economic despair, deprivation. This is what I saw. I saw people struggling to get by, not knowing what was what and what was next. And then I asked myself the question. I say, "How's it possible that we could be so poor here in the United States, because the coal is such a wealthy resource, it's so much money?" And I realized, because the Chinese ingratiated themselves with a small ruling class here in the United States who stole all of that money and all of that wealth for themselves. And the rest of us, the vast majority of us, struggle to get by.And the Chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like mewould not speak out against this relationship. Does this sound familiar?
2:12And they did things like train Americans to help protect the coal. And everywhere, were symbols of the Chinese -- everywhere, a constant reminder. And back in China, what do they say in China? Nothing. They don't talk about us. They don't talk about the coal. If you ask them,they'll say, "Well, you know the coal, we need the coal. I mean, come on, I'm not going to turn down my thermostat. You can't expect that."And so I get angry, and I get pissed, as do lots of average people. And we fight back, and it gets really ugly. And the Chinese respond in a very ugly way. And before we know it, they send in the tanks and then send in the troops, and lots of people are dying, and it's a very, very difficult situation.
3:03Can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes? Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there or a truck full of soldiers? And just imagine what you would feel. Because you know why they're here, and you know what they're doing here. And you just feel the anger and you feel the fear. If you can, that's empathy -- that's empathy. You've left your shoes, and you've stood in mine. And you've got to feel that.
3:33Okay, so that's the warm up. That's the warm up. Now we're going to have the real radical experiment. And so for the remainder of my talk, what I want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary Arab Muslim living in the Middle East -- in particular, in Iraq. And so to help you, perhaps you're a member of this middle class family in Baghdad -- and what you want is the best for your kids. You want your kids to have a better life. And you watch the news, you pay attention, you read the newspaper, you go down to the coffee shop with your friends, and you read the newspapers from around the world. And sometimes you even watch satellite, CNN, from the United States. So you have a sense of what the Americans are thinking. But really, you just want a better life for yourself. That's what you want. You're Arab Muslim living in Iraq. You want a better life for yourself.
4:28So here, let me help you. Let me help you with some things that you might be thinking. Number one: this incursion into your land these past 20 years, and before, the reason anyone is interested in your land, and particularly the United States, it's oil. It's all about oil; you know that, everybody knows that. People here back in the United States know it's about oil. It's because somebody else has a design for your resource. It's your resource; it's not somebody else's. It's your land; it's your resource. Somebody else has a design for it. And you know why they have a design? You know why they have their eyes set on it? Because they have an entire economic system that's dependent on that oil -- foreign oil, oil from other parts of the world that they don't own.
5:16And what else do you think about these people? The Americans, they're rich. Come on, they live in big houses, they have big cars, they all have blond hair, blue eyes, they're happy. You think that. It's not true, of course, but that's the media impression, and that's like what you get. And they have big cities, and the cities are all dependent on oil. And back home, what do you see? Poverty, despair, struggle. Look, you don't live in a wealthy country. This is Iraq. This is what you see. You see people struggling to get by. I mean, it's not easy; you see a lot of poverty. And you feel something about this. These people have designs for your resource, and this is what you see?
5:58Something else you see that you talk about -- Americans don't talk about this, but you do. There's this thing, this militarization of the world,and it's centered right in the United States. And the United States is responsible for almost one half of the world's military spending -- four percent of the world's population. And you feel it; you see it every day. It's part of your life. And you talk about it with your friends. You read about it. And back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered. And what you see, something else, the United States, the hub of democracy around the world, they don't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world.There are a lot of countries, oil-producing countries, that aren't very democratic, but supported by the United States. That's odd.
7:03Oh, these incursions, these two wars, the 10 years of sanctions, the eight years of occupation, the insurgency that's been unleashed on your people, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, all because of oil. You can't help but think that. You talk about it. It's in the forefront of your mind always. You say, "How is that possible?" And this man, he's every man -- your grandfather, your uncle, your father, your son, your neighbor, your professor, your student. Once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly, pain and sorrow.Everyone in your country has been touched by the violence, the bloodshed, the pain, the horror, everybody. Not a single person in your country has not been touched.
8:07But there's something else. There's something else about these people, these Americans who are there. There's something else about them that you see -- they don't see themselves. And what do you see? They're Christians. They're Christians. They worship the Christian God, they have crosses, they carry Bibles. Their Bibles have a little insignia that says "U.S. Army" on them. And their leaders, their leaders: before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country -- and you know the reason -- before they send them off, they go to a Christian church, and they pray to their Christian God, and they ask for protection and guidance from that god. Why? Well, obviously, when people die in the war, they are Muslims, they are Iraqis -- they're not Americans. You don't want Americans to die. Protect our troops. And you feel something about that -- of course you do. And they do wonderful things. You read about it, you hear about it. They're there to build schools and help people, and that's what they want to do. They do wonderful things, but they also do the bad things, and you can't tell the difference.
9:13And this guy, you get a guy like Lt. Gen. William Boykin. I mean, here's a guy who says that your God is a false God. Your God's an idol; his God is the true God. The solution to the problem in the Middle East, according to him, is to convert you all to Christianity -- just get rid of your religion. And you know that. Americans don't read about this guy. They don't know anything about him, but you do. You pass it around. You pass his words around. I mean this is serious. You're afraid. He was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of Iraq. And you're thinking, "God, if this guy is saying that, then all the soldiers must be saying that." And this word here, George Bush called this war a crusade. Man, the Americans, they're just like, "Ah, crusade. Whatever. I don't know." You know what it means. It's a holy war against Muslims. Look, invade, subdue them, take their resources. If they won't submit, kill them. That's what this is about. And you're thinking, "My God, these Christians are coming to kill us." This is frightening. You feel frightened. Of course you feel frightened.
10:14And this man, Terry Jones: I mean here's a guy who wants to burn Korans, right? And the Americans: "Ah, he's a knucklehead. He's a former hotel manager; he's got three-dozen members of his church." They laugh him off. You don't laugh him off. Because in the context of everything else, all the pieces fit. I mean, of course, this is how Americans take it, so people all over the Middle East, not just in your country, are protesting. "He wants to burn Korans, our holy book. These Christians, who are these Christians? They're so evil, they're so mean -- this is what they're about." This is what you're thinking as an Arab Muslim, as an Iraqi. Of course you're going to think this.
10:51And then your cousin says, "Hey cuz, check out this website. You've got to see this -- Bible Boot Camp. These Christians are nuts. They're training their little kids to be soldiers for Jesus. And they take these little kids and they run them through these things till they teach them how to say, "Sir, yes, sir," and things like grenade toss and weapons care and maintenance. And go to the website. It says "U.S. Army" right on it. I mean, these Christians, they're nuts. How would they do this to their little kids?" And you're reading this website. And of course, Christians back in the United States, or anybody, says, "Ah, this is some little, tiny church in the middle of nowhere." You don't know that.For you, this is like all Christians. It's all over the Web, Bible Boot Camp. And look at this: they even teach their kids -- they train them in the same way the U.S. Marines train. Isn't that interesting. And it scares you, and it frightens you.
11:40So these guys, you see them. You see, I, Sam Richards, I know who these guys are. They're my students, my friends. I know what they're thinking: "You don't know." When you see them, they're something else, they're something else. That's what they are to you. We don't see it that way in the United States, but you see it that way. So here. Of course, you got it wrong. You're generalizing. It's wrong. You don't understand the Americans. It's not a Christian invasion. We're not just there for oil; we're there for lots of reasons. You have it wrong. You've missed it. And of course, most of you don't support the insurgency; you don't support killing Americans; you don't support the terrorists. Of course you don't. Very few people do. But some of you do. And this is a perspective. Okay, so now, here's what we're going to do.
12:37Step outside of your shoes that you're in right now and step back into your normal shoes. So everyone's back in the room, okay. Now here comes the radical experiment. So we're all back home. This photo: this woman, man, I feel her. I feel her. She's my sister, my wife, my cousin, my neighbor. She's anybody to me. These guys standing there, everybody in the photo, I feel this photo, man. So here's what I want you to do.
13:09Let's go back to my first example of the Chinese. So I want you to go there. So it's all about coal, and the Chinese are here in the United States. And what I want you to do is picture her as a Chinese woman receiving a Chinese flag because her loved one has died in America in the coal uprising. And the soldiers are Chinese, and everybody else is Chinese. As an American, how do you feel about this picture? What do you think about that scene?
13:42Okay, try this. Bring it back. This is the scene here. It's an American, American soldiers, American woman who lost her loved one in the Middle East -- in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now, put yourself in the shoes, go back to the shoes of an Arab Muslim living in Iraq. What are you feeling and thinking about this photo, about this woman?
14:16Okay, now follow me on this, because I'm taking a big risk here. And so I'm going to invite you to take a risk with me. These gentlemen here, they're insurgents. They were caught by the American soldiers, trying to kill Americans. And maybe they succeeded. Maybe they succeeded. Put yourself in the shoes of the Americans who caught them. Can you feel the rage? Can you feel that you just want to take these guys and wring their necks? Can you go there? It shouldn't be that difficult. You just -- oh, man. Now, put yourself in their shoes. Are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders? Which one? Can you feel their anger, their fear, their rage at what has happened in their country?Can you imagine that maybe one of them in the morning bent down to their child and hugged their child and said, "Dear, I'll be back later.I'm going out to defend your freedom, your lives. I'm going out to look out for us, the future of our country." Can you imagine that? Can you imagine saying that? Can you go there? What do you think they're feeling? You see, that's empathy. It's also understanding.
16:03Now, you might ask, "Okay, Sam, so why do you do this sort of thing? Why would you use this example of all examples?" And I say, because ... because. You're allowed to hate these people. You're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being. And if I can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch, one tiny inch, then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life. You can walk a mile when it comes to understanding why that person's driving 40 miles per hour in the passing lane, or your teenage son, or your neighbor who annoys you by cutting his lawn on Sunday mornings. Whatever it is, you can go so far. And this is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny, little world. Step inside of the tiny, little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly all these tiny, little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world. And suddenly, without realizing it, you're seeing the world differently. Everything has changed. Everything in your life has changed.And that's, of course, what this is about.
17:27Attend to other lives, other visions. Listen to other people, enlighten ourselves. I'm not saying that I support the terrorists in Iraq, but as a sociologist, what I am saying is I understand. And now perhaps -- perhaps -- you do too.
17:53Thank you.
A radical experiment in empathy
TEDxPSU · 18:07 · Filmed Oct 2010
0:11My students often ask me, "What is sociology?" And I tell them, "It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see." And they say, "So how can I be a sociologist? How can I understand those invisible forces?" And I say, "Empathy. Start with empathy. It all begins with empathy. Take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person."
0:40Here, I'll give you an example. So I imagine my life: if a hundred years ago China had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the United States in search of coal, and they found it, and, in fact, they found lots of it right here. And pretty soon, they began shipping that coal, ton by ton, rail car by rail car, boatload by boatload, back to China and elsewhere around the world. And they got fabulously wealthy in doing so. And they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal. And back here in the United States, we saw economic despair, deprivation. This is what I saw. I saw people struggling to get by, not knowing what was what and what was next. And then I asked myself the question. I say, "How's it possible that we could be so poor here in the United States, because the coal is such a wealthy resource, it's so much money?" And I realized, because the Chinese ingratiated themselves with a small ruling class here in the United States who stole all of that money and all of that wealth for themselves. And the rest of us, the vast majority of us, struggle to get by.And the Chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like mewould not speak out against this relationship. Does this sound familiar?
2:12And they did things like train Americans to help protect the coal. And everywhere, were symbols of the Chinese -- everywhere, a constant reminder. And back in China, what do they say in China? Nothing. They don't talk about us. They don't talk about the coal. If you ask them,they'll say, "Well, you know the coal, we need the coal. I mean, come on, I'm not going to turn down my thermostat. You can't expect that."And so I get angry, and I get pissed, as do lots of average people. And we fight back, and it gets really ugly. And the Chinese respond in a very ugly way. And before we know it, they send in the tanks and then send in the troops, and lots of people are dying, and it's a very, very difficult situation.
3:03Can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes? Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there or a truck full of soldiers? And just imagine what you would feel. Because you know why they're here, and you know what they're doing here. And you just feel the anger and you feel the fear. If you can, that's empathy -- that's empathy. You've left your shoes, and you've stood in mine. And you've got to feel that.
3:33Okay, so that's the warm up. That's the warm up. Now we're going to have the real radical experiment. And so for the remainder of my talk, what I want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary Arab Muslim living in the Middle East -- in particular, in Iraq. And so to help you, perhaps you're a member of this middle class family in Baghdad -- and what you want is the best for your kids. You want your kids to have a better life. And you watch the news, you pay attention, you read the newspaper, you go down to the coffee shop with your friends, and you read the newspapers from around the world. And sometimes you even watch satellite, CNN, from the United States. So you have a sense of what the Americans are thinking. But really, you just want a better life for yourself. That's what you want. You're Arab Muslim living in Iraq. You want a better life for yourself.
4:28So here, let me help you. Let me help you with some things that you might be thinking. Number one: this incursion into your land these past 20 years, and before, the reason anyone is interested in your land, and particularly the United States, it's oil. It's all about oil; you know that, everybody knows that. People here back in the United States know it's about oil. It's because somebody else has a design for your resource. It's your resource; it's not somebody else's. It's your land; it's your resource. Somebody else has a design for it. And you know why they have a design? You know why they have their eyes set on it? Because they have an entire economic system that's dependent on that oil -- foreign oil, oil from other parts of the world that they don't own.
5:16And what else do you think about these people? The Americans, they're rich. Come on, they live in big houses, they have big cars, they all have blond hair, blue eyes, they're happy. You think that. It's not true, of course, but that's the media impression, and that's like what you get. And they have big cities, and the cities are all dependent on oil. And back home, what do you see? Poverty, despair, struggle. Look, you don't live in a wealthy country. This is Iraq. This is what you see. You see people struggling to get by. I mean, it's not easy; you see a lot of poverty. And you feel something about this. These people have designs for your resource, and this is what you see?
5:58Something else you see that you talk about -- Americans don't talk about this, but you do. There's this thing, this militarization of the world,and it's centered right in the United States. And the United States is responsible for almost one half of the world's military spending -- four percent of the world's population. And you feel it; you see it every day. It's part of your life. And you talk about it with your friends. You read about it. And back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered. And what you see, something else, the United States, the hub of democracy around the world, they don't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world.There are a lot of countries, oil-producing countries, that aren't very democratic, but supported by the United States. That's odd.
7:03Oh, these incursions, these two wars, the 10 years of sanctions, the eight years of occupation, the insurgency that's been unleashed on your people, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, all because of oil. You can't help but think that. You talk about it. It's in the forefront of your mind always. You say, "How is that possible?" And this man, he's every man -- your grandfather, your uncle, your father, your son, your neighbor, your professor, your student. Once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly, pain and sorrow.Everyone in your country has been touched by the violence, the bloodshed, the pain, the horror, everybody. Not a single person in your country has not been touched.
8:07But there's something else. There's something else about these people, these Americans who are there. There's something else about them that you see -- they don't see themselves. And what do you see? They're Christians. They're Christians. They worship the Christian God, they have crosses, they carry Bibles. Their Bibles have a little insignia that says "U.S. Army" on them. And their leaders, their leaders: before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country -- and you know the reason -- before they send them off, they go to a Christian church, and they pray to their Christian God, and they ask for protection and guidance from that god. Why? Well, obviously, when people die in the war, they are Muslims, they are Iraqis -- they're not Americans. You don't want Americans to die. Protect our troops. And you feel something about that -- of course you do. And they do wonderful things. You read about it, you hear about it. They're there to build schools and help people, and that's what they want to do. They do wonderful things, but they also do the bad things, and you can't tell the difference.
9:13And this guy, you get a guy like Lt. Gen. William Boykin. I mean, here's a guy who says that your God is a false God. Your God's an idol; his God is the true God. The solution to the problem in the Middle East, according to him, is to convert you all to Christianity -- just get rid of your religion. And you know that. Americans don't read about this guy. They don't know anything about him, but you do. You pass it around. You pass his words around. I mean this is serious. You're afraid. He was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of Iraq. And you're thinking, "God, if this guy is saying that, then all the soldiers must be saying that." And this word here, George Bush called this war a crusade. Man, the Americans, they're just like, "Ah, crusade. Whatever. I don't know." You know what it means. It's a holy war against Muslims. Look, invade, subdue them, take their resources. If they won't submit, kill them. That's what this is about. And you're thinking, "My God, these Christians are coming to kill us." This is frightening. You feel frightened. Of course you feel frightened.
10:14And this man, Terry Jones: I mean here's a guy who wants to burn Korans, right? And the Americans: "Ah, he's a knucklehead. He's a former hotel manager; he's got three-dozen members of his church." They laugh him off. You don't laugh him off. Because in the context of everything else, all the pieces fit. I mean, of course, this is how Americans take it, so people all over the Middle East, not just in your country, are protesting. "He wants to burn Korans, our holy book. These Christians, who are these Christians? They're so evil, they're so mean -- this is what they're about." This is what you're thinking as an Arab Muslim, as an Iraqi. Of course you're going to think this.
10:51And then your cousin says, "Hey cuz, check out this website. You've got to see this -- Bible Boot Camp. These Christians are nuts. They're training their little kids to be soldiers for Jesus. And they take these little kids and they run them through these things till they teach them how to say, "Sir, yes, sir," and things like grenade toss and weapons care and maintenance. And go to the website. It says "U.S. Army" right on it. I mean, these Christians, they're nuts. How would they do this to their little kids?" And you're reading this website. And of course, Christians back in the United States, or anybody, says, "Ah, this is some little, tiny church in the middle of nowhere." You don't know that.For you, this is like all Christians. It's all over the Web, Bible Boot Camp. And look at this: they even teach their kids -- they train them in the same way the U.S. Marines train. Isn't that interesting. And it scares you, and it frightens you.
11:40So these guys, you see them. You see, I, Sam Richards, I know who these guys are. They're my students, my friends. I know what they're thinking: "You don't know." When you see them, they're something else, they're something else. That's what they are to you. We don't see it that way in the United States, but you see it that way. So here. Of course, you got it wrong. You're generalizing. It's wrong. You don't understand the Americans. It's not a Christian invasion. We're not just there for oil; we're there for lots of reasons. You have it wrong. You've missed it. And of course, most of you don't support the insurgency; you don't support killing Americans; you don't support the terrorists. Of course you don't. Very few people do. But some of you do. And this is a perspective. Okay, so now, here's what we're going to do.
12:37Step outside of your shoes that you're in right now and step back into your normal shoes. So everyone's back in the room, okay. Now here comes the radical experiment. So we're all back home. This photo: this woman, man, I feel her. I feel her. She's my sister, my wife, my cousin, my neighbor. She's anybody to me. These guys standing there, everybody in the photo, I feel this photo, man. So here's what I want you to do.
13:09Let's go back to my first example of the Chinese. So I want you to go there. So it's all about coal, and the Chinese are here in the United States. And what I want you to do is picture her as a Chinese woman receiving a Chinese flag because her loved one has died in America in the coal uprising. And the soldiers are Chinese, and everybody else is Chinese. As an American, how do you feel about this picture? What do you think about that scene?
13:42Okay, try this. Bring it back. This is the scene here. It's an American, American soldiers, American woman who lost her loved one in the Middle East -- in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now, put yourself in the shoes, go back to the shoes of an Arab Muslim living in Iraq. What are you feeling and thinking about this photo, about this woman?
14:16Okay, now follow me on this, because I'm taking a big risk here. And so I'm going to invite you to take a risk with me. These gentlemen here, they're insurgents. They were caught by the American soldiers, trying to kill Americans. And maybe they succeeded. Maybe they succeeded. Put yourself in the shoes of the Americans who caught them. Can you feel the rage? Can you feel that you just want to take these guys and wring their necks? Can you go there? It shouldn't be that difficult. You just -- oh, man. Now, put yourself in their shoes. Are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders? Which one? Can you feel their anger, their fear, their rage at what has happened in their country?Can you imagine that maybe one of them in the morning bent down to their child and hugged their child and said, "Dear, I'll be back later.I'm going out to defend your freedom, your lives. I'm going out to look out for us, the future of our country." Can you imagine that? Can you imagine saying that? Can you go there? What do you think they're feeling? You see, that's empathy. It's also understanding.
16:03Now, you might ask, "Okay, Sam, so why do you do this sort of thing? Why would you use this example of all examples?" And I say, because ... because. You're allowed to hate these people. You're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being. And if I can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch, one tiny inch, then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life. You can walk a mile when it comes to understanding why that person's driving 40 miles per hour in the passing lane, or your teenage son, or your neighbor who annoys you by cutting his lawn on Sunday mornings. Whatever it is, you can go so far. And this is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny, little world. Step inside of the tiny, little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly all these tiny, little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world. And suddenly, without realizing it, you're seeing the world differently. Everything has changed. Everything in your life has changed.And that's, of course, what this is about.
17:27Attend to other lives, other visions. Listen to other people, enlighten ourselves. I'm not saying that I support the terrorists in Iraq, but as a sociologist, what I am saying is I understand. And now perhaps -- perhaps -- you do too.
17:53Thank you.