Make speech heard

How can we better understand the American prison system through the lens of race? This question was posed by the Center for African American Studies, which held the “Imprisonment of a Race” conference last month. Among the speakers, experts and professors from Yale, Columbia and many other schools, there was one outlier: death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal, who could only speak for 15 minutes over telephone due to the regulations of SCI Greene maximum-security prison in Waynesburg, Pa., was convicted of the 1981 murder of white police officer Daniel Faulkner. In the department’s estimation, Abu-Jamal’s personal experience makes him a good contributor to the discussion.

Not so, suggests Brian Lipshutz. In his April 6 column titled “Justice for Daniel Faulkner,” Lipshutz argues that while “everyone is entitled to free speech, convicted cop-killer or otherwise,” criminals like Abu-Jamal should perhaps not be afforded “such a prestigious platform in an academic discussion.”

This separation between a prisoner’s freedom to speak and right to be heard is dubious. Prisons are a black hole in the domain of free speech; no prisoner can make their views known to the public without the assistance of some organization or individual willing to listen. Freedom to speak to four cell walls is an empty protection.

Martin Luther King and civil rights activists convinced voters to fight discrimination because of the visibility of events such as the Montgomery protests. Yet prisoners lack the ability and visibility required to protest, organize and petition for the basic democratic protections of proper living conditions and an equal justice system. Taking these rights from prisoners, justified or not, burdens us with their protection because they cannot protect themselves.

I can understand why having a convicted murderer speak might be objectionable to some. Yet, ultimately, it is necessary — anyone with knowledge of the prison system from the perspective of an inmate was necessarily convicted of a crime. The alternative to affording convicts a “prestigious platform in an academic discussion” is to reject their contributions altogether because of their criminal status, which even Lipshutz acknowledges is “unacceptably ad hominem.”

But even if we must include convicts, why should we be giving this platform to an unrepentant murderer? This objection seems more valid, but is still questionable. The death penalty is reserved in the United States for aggravated and felony murder. A conversation on the racial aspects of death row will necessarily include some convicted of those crimes. The problem of prisoner welfare has always been one of invisibility.

Some might contend that cop killers especially deserve the public admonishment due their crime. Yet this distinction exhibits the very discrimination that critical analysis of the justice system is meant to eliminate. Murder is murder regardless of the identity of the victim, and to say the murder of a white police officer is a worse offence implies that there are less-significant murders.

The Government Accountability Office found that in cases of murder, the single most accurate predictor of a death sentence is the race of the victim: African Americans receive the death penalty three times more when the victim is white.

So clearly our justice system takes into account the “value” of the murder victim in assessing punishment — whether race in the case of white victims or esteem in the case of police officers — and this is discrimination.

The true test of our justice system is not how it treats the popular criminals, but the most hated criminals. Thus it would be foolish to exclude African Americans convicted of killing white police officers from a conversation about racial discrimination in death row sentencing. Because they receive the worst possible discrimination in sentencing, they exactly should be included.

A similar discussion occurred a few weeks ago when activist Hanan Ashrawi spoke on campus as a representative for the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. Congress. Some questioned whether Princeton should lend its reputation to such a speaker.

Yet the terrorist classification process is complicated and politicized, making it exactly the kind of thing that should be studied and reviewed in academic environments such as the Wilson School.

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Any policy inquiry must include all parties affected in order to maintain accuracy. Just as academia must listen to those called terrorists to evaluate the government’s policies, so too must we allow those deemed guiltiest by our courts to speak when evaluating our justice system. Thus, the claim that inviting a speaker to campus is an act of uncritical endorsement rings hollow.

Ultimately, despite what seems like a great deal of reservation, Lipshutz concludes correctly, “We should contemplate uncomfortable facts, unsavory people and difficult situations in our academic discussions, because that is how learning takes place.” Yet this observation requires us not only to passively oppose restrictions on speech, but to actively support free speech and the discourse necessary to ensure justice on behalf of those we have deemed, rightly or wrongly, to be unworthy of direct participation in our society.

Allen Paltrow is a freshman from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at apaltrow@princeton.edu.