Designer's Statement
Dear viewer,
My project began somewhere between curiosity and stubbornness; I am an avid fan of documentaries, and one I became particularly engrossed with flashed up the statistic “someone in America is arrested every three seconds” at the beginning of each episode. I couldn’t piece together how it would make sense that arrest rates were so high, so I chalked it up to a sensationalized figure meant to garner interest from its audience. By the time I got around to fact-checking it, I was appalled. The statistic was actually based on a dataset that indicated a ten-year downtrend in arrests. My brain couldn’t stop reeling with questions. At first, I approached the problem in a way I thought I could solve. I wanted to know exactly what exists, how it works, and why we accept a system that is so heavily punitive. My questions were fairly base-level. What is crime, how do we define cause for incarceration? What could possibly warrant the need for so many arrests? I could answer my questions in a general way, but I wanted to know every detail.
I wanted to justify my personal opinions with facts and figures. I started designing infographs, collecting data and visualizing it in a way that lead my audience to believe what I believe. I wanted to be fair, but I also wanted to be right. But it still didn't feel right enough, and I realized I wasn't satisfied with confirming my own convictions. My questions became more philosophical the more time I spent thinking. Even in the idle parts of my day, I was trying to problem-solve a question I still didn't understand. I can’t honestly say why it bothered me so much, but it was all I could think about. Every piece of information I consumed led to follow-up questions. What if they got the wrong person? What if the person was in an extreme situation where they felt endangered? What if the person committed the crime for a greater good? What if the person was falsely accused?
I tried to satisfy each question with more research, but my shift in curiosity resulted in research that seldom felt conclusive or productive. All of my diligence felt underwhelming and flat, and I started to wonder if I was asking a question bigger than the scope of my problem space. I wanted to first understand how other people feel and think and to later understand how this translates in a legal sense, so I shifted my focus. I started asking myself what I thought and why I thought it, because I couldn't tackle the elusive "other" without first defining it for myself. I recalled Heinz dilemma, some strange tidbit of information I had stored in my brain from my childhood. It felt relieving, like I had identified a key point in framing my problem.
Heinz dilemma is perhaps the most commonly known ethical dilemma in the western world. Details vary from source to source, but the story goes that Heinz’s wife is dying of cancer. There is only one drug that can cure her, and, as luck would have it, the drug manufacturer lives in his town. Due to its efficacy and limited supply, the drug is too expensive for Heinz to afford, so he asks everyone he possibly can for donations. He is decently successful, but he can only raise half of the funds, so Heinz goes to the drug manufacturer and explains his situation. He pleads with the drug maker to sell the drug at half the cost or to allow him to make a partial payment before his wife dies, then pay the rest later. The drug maker refuses, telling him that it was his work and ingenuity that led to the drug's invention and he deserves to be compensated for his years of effort. With all other options exhausted, Heinz decides to break into the pharmacy and steal the drug.
Is Heinz right in stealing the drug and saving his wife, or is he wrong for taking something that was not his? There is no doubt that Heinz committed a crime, but what is a just punishment? Is he more a hero and the drug manufacturer guilty for his greed? At what cost should we protect life, and is there a point that social consciousness changes what we consider criminal?
Heinz dilemma summarized many of the points in our legal system that bother me. I was curious how Heinz would fare in our legal system, what his sentence would be. I started trying to piece together some of my earlier research to apply the technical points in our process to the theoretical story of Heinz. My curiosity about how we define crime had a new lens, a different way I could present it to my audience, but it felt a little different this time. How do we adjudicate the outliers? I think most people could empathize with Heinz, regardless of their opinion of his guilt, but how would they punish them if sat on his jury? Did Heinz need to be used as an example, a symbol of the repercussions of vigilante justice, or should he be granted leniency for the nobility of his intent?
Around this point, it became clear that I no longer had a solution to offer. I didn't want to make an infographic that highlighted what I view as unjust. We have those. The information is available, and most people who are curious or who have skin in the game are already aware ,or at the very least have the means to form their own opinions. I didn’t want to point fingers, to identify one bad actor who is disrupting the system, because I don’t know that people can be put into categories so easily. What feels closer to the truth is that life is a little too messy for people to fit neatly into these kinds of categories. I think life is a complex web of decisions, and sometimes we are given the tools and opportunities to balance them more effectively, and sometimes we do the best we can with what we have in the moment we have it. I think blame is often the path of least resistance. If we can place blame somewhere else, we can placate ourselves with feeling as though we are not responsible, that it is someone else's problem and we have done our part. If we say that our system is broken and corrupted because of an adversarial legal system or corrupt law enforcement or the harshly punitive penal system, we don't have to be right or wrong. We get to kick the problem to someone else, because we don't have to look at it. We can complain with the best of them and talk about how important social change is, and cite our favorite facts in comfortable conversation and feel really good about how aware we are. But if the systems are flawed, doesn't the burden of justice shift to the last resort, to our civic duty?
By this time, all of my original questions had been obliterated. I didn't even want an answer, I just wanted to engage. I started looking into actual cases, real examples I could cite to guide my audience through my personal journey. Some I empathized heavily with, some I felt were just. There wasn't a common theme am I could identify, because each case was so highly unique.
Theoretically, I can see how an objective system could make sense. A crime occurs, someone is arrested, and the guilty party must face consequences for their actions. But what happens when the crime is a 19-year-old boy who witnessed his neighbor drunkenly beating a disabled man and stepped in, throwing one blow and inadvertently killing the aggressor? A crime occurred. The boy was responsible for another man’s death. But should he be prosecuted for acting in the defense of someone who was unable to defend themselves? Or the case of a father involved in a car accident that resulted in the other driver’s death? Even knowing that the other driver veered into his car, he had to be held accountable for the other person's death, even though it was pure chance he was driving on the same road as the victim. Manslaughter is a mandatory one-year prison sentence. He spent a year incarcerated, away from his wife and young children, because of this purely random and tragic accident. Is that just?
In my review of cases, I stumbled upon the story of Cyntoia Brown. I chose Cyntoia's case for many reasons. I felt that her story fell in the gray area of criminal justice that had aroused my curiosity. It was thought-provoking and complex. I could understand the jury's decision as much as I felt the need to advocate for her. Many news stories reflected my own personal conflicting feelings, presenting her guilt and empathy for her situation in equal stride. I read the court transcripts, reread them line by line, highlighting key points, sketching the crime scene and timeline, carefully recording and reviewing evidence and eyewitness testimony to make sure I understood.
When I watched the documentary that followed her story, I realized that my interest in her case was because she represented my version of the Heinz dilemma. The documentary followed her experience during her incarceration leading up to her trial and conviction. Seeing her story and hearing her explain that night in her own words drastically changed my perspective. Up until that point, I could have given you a highly-detailed, accurate description of the events that occurred the night she killed Johnny Allen. It wasn't until I heard her account that I realized the question I had been after all along. Should we punish humans for instinctual, reactionary actions and behaviors? Is it possible to maintain law and order while considering our individual complexity and unique perspectives? And if it isn't, if we as a society believe crime should always result in punishment, can we in good conscience say that the rigidity of a legal system can govern a body of highly complex individuals? I still don't have an answer for myself, and even if I did, I'm not sure I would want to tell you. I am more interested in knowing what you think. A kind of collaborative effort, a means of sense-making as a collective community. Maybe there isn't a good answer, but I am certain that thoughts are only strengthened when challenged.
I choose to believe that most people are good, and that if we were tasked with deciding someone else's fate, we would want to have as much context as possible before passing a legally-binding decision that finds a peer irredeemable. And I would hope that if it were you or I receiving that judgment, we would have the chance to tell our story.
So, dear viewer, I will leave you with one final thought. I know an epigraph probably would have made more sense, but in writing this statement, I keep thinking back to a quote from my favorite movie. Ironically, it came out in 2006, the year Cyntoia Brown was sentenced to life in prison at age 18. I would've been 13 the first time I heard it, but it has stayed with me and continues to shape the way I choose to view people and the world around me:
"Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us. I hope that whoever you are, you escape this place. I hope that the worlds turns, and that things get better. But what I hope most of all is that you understand what I mean when I tell you that even though I do not know you, and even though I may never meet you, laugh with you, cry with you, or kiss you, I love you. With all my heart, I love you."
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