My essential question departed significantly from the original project, where I knew I wanted to explore communities and the relationships between people and physical spaces, and courts and the written law. After shelter-in-place, I changed the essential question to a very open one that could be answered without being as rooted in a specific place, because I knew that Covid-19 would grow the distance between my own privileged life and the daily realities of the criminal justice system. 

I expected to be learning a lot through observance, specifically through court watching and listening and watching people involved in the system. Instead, I learned a lot through reading, in both my readings for my online class and my independent readings — articles, papers and books. Basically what happened was that I started off my project by reading Dead Man Walking, which I had planned on reading anyways because I assumed I would be going down South, and I wanted to have a little background. After reading the book, which honestly felt life changing at times, I was left with a few answers and many questions. I kind of imagined my new project going in two different directions. The first would be learning about the framework that built the US justice system — the morals and philosophies that grounded the law. Dead Man Walking was written by Sister Helen Prejean, a Catholic nun, so the text is centrally concerned with morality of not just the death penalty, but the entire penal system in America. While I had thought about this before in Calvin’s Mass Incarceration Literature class, something about the book pushed me to get interested not just in the history and sociology of punishment, but the philosophy of it. I went about this exploration through my online class, where I ended up learning a lot more about legal and political philosophy than I intended to. Often the professor would reframe the sometimes outdated philosophical texts we were picking apart to modern cases in the US, which encouraged me to continually connect the theories to my original essential question. I also spent a lot of time thinking about how systems of oppression either create or impact the implementation of the moral schematics that form our conception of justice. 

The second direction I took to further the discussions in Dead Man Walking was to look at the state of our justice system, and how it holds up to those frameworks. I read a lot specifically about the appeals system within prisons, and I actually spent a lot of time looking at Angola (aka the Louisiana State Penitentiary), the prison in Dead Man Walking, which is notoriously the “worst” prison in the US. While much of this research focused on mass incarceration and the Prison Industrial Complex, I also looked at how the justice system — from the Supreme Court to Rikers Island — is responding to Covid-19 and specifically the stay at home orders.

I think the metacognition aspect of the project, where we were constantly analyzing our own projects in cohort meetings, helped me learn a lot about my own habits and strengths. For example, I’ve never really sat through lectures and taken notes, and I’ve definitely never sat through lectures where the teacher and class aren’t around you. This experience helped me grow my confidence in my ability to take in information through that format in a really meaningful way, especially starting college in the fall. The project definitely furthered my interest in criminal justice, but I knew that going into the project, which is why I was curious about it in the first place. The exposure to philosophy was definitely super valuable for me because it wasn’t something that I’d learned about at all.