Christy Wise
Life Sauce.Org, USA
Title: Mass incarceration: Psychological issues impacting men, women, and children
Biography
Biography: Christy Wise
Abstract
Statement of the problem: The United States incarcerates more people than any other country. Many factors contribute to this phenomenon, including a criminal justice system with ongoing race-based injustices, a strong and unchecked prosecutorial system, a failure to rehabilitate those previously incarcerated, unidentified and untreated mental health issues. Underlying it all – there’s a growing lack of empathy in this country. One way to build empathy is to experience something you may never have experienced – and don’t ever intend to engage. Awareness through empathic thought can open minds to the horrors of imprisonment that can, over time, lead to prison reform. Exploring reform issues, as expressed through different artistic lenses, is a psychological field trip into the criminal justice system’s emotional/social impact on men, women, and families. Incarceration inoculates inmates, and their families, with feelings of fear, eroded dignity, humiliation, emotional darkness.
Methodology & Theoretical Orientation: Using the Arts in different media such as poetry, plays, literature, paintings, and the film becomes the vehicle for experiencing something never experience, through alternative means.
Representative works include: Oscar Wilde - The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Poem, 1896, Tennessee Williams -Not About Nightingales (Play,1938), Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking (Book/Film, 1995), Salvador Dali - Melting clocks, The Persistence of Memory (Painting, 1931), and Franz Kafka, The Trial (Novel, 1925).
Findings: Current research on the experience of understanding another person's thoughts, feelings, and condition from their point of view, rather than from your own will be reviewed. Where a more empathic approach within the criminal justice system, inmate incarceration system, and reentry system can affect important social change will be explored.
Conclusion & Significance: Social change can only come about when people can empathize with the others. Empathy facilitates prosocial behaviors that come from within, rather than being forced, so that we behave in a more compassionate manner with those caught in the jaws of the criminal justice system in the United States.