This new video from The Atlantic is very interesting on two levels. In terms of content, it is a harsh indictment against inequality and discrimination in the country of unlimited possibilities. The possibilities that are stiffer than advertised. Race and origin appears to have a growing impact on the future of the children and are told through figures about prisoners in this video.
Sociologist Bruce Western explains the current inevitability of prison for certain demographics of young black men and how it’s become a normal life event. He is doing this in a the form of a animated interview. And that is the other interesting level. It makes the interview more powerful without being distracted by the interviewee. It’s a of kind infographic with an opinion.
Bruce Western:
We’ve chosen prison as a way to respond to the problem of crime. There are a whole variety of ways we’ve could have chosen. We’ve chosen the response of the deprivation of liberty for a historically aggrieved group, whose liberty in the United States was never firmly established to begin with.
Bruce Western is a professor of sociology and the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy at Harvard University. He is also the director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
