From the workplace to the home, we constantly receive signals that it is not okay to feel not O.K, regardless of the situations and emotions we try to compartmentalize. Take a moment to reflect on the common language we use to describe people who show signs of distress: we call them “crazy,” “psycho,” “dangerous,” “burnout,” “trash,” “hothead,” and “lunatic.” We scapegoat them for their trauma or mental illness. We perpetuate a culture that rejects different ways of being, and shame people who show vulnerability. The carceral system reflects this same impatience and condemnation.
I do not often cry during movies. However, a tearful moment arose when I watched Herbert Richardson (played by Rob Morgan) prepare for his execution in Just Mercy. In 1978, Richardson placed a bomb on the doorstep of a nurse for whom he developed feelings which detonated and killed a young girl named Rena Mae. Richardson was eventually charged and convicted of capital murder. He was executed in Alabama on August 18, 1989. Many people would punctuate this summary with a “good riddance,” but that is not how I regard people’s lives. Having lost his mother at age three and experiencing physical abuse throughout his childhood, Richardson developed a severe psychiatric illness while serving in the Vietnam War. He met the nurse after he was honorably discharged. Unable to distinguish wartime from civilian life, Richardson attempted to create a situation in which he would rescue the woman from danger and she would prize him forever as her hero. Tragically, Mae was an unintentional casualty of Richardson’s plea for affection. Inadequately treated, Richardson’s trauma, from his toddler years to his return from war, festered and manifested itself into someone else’s traumatic event. Dungeons with six-by-six concrete crates and armed guards do not improve or protect society; they perpetuate violence among those who are mentally struggling or have been traumatized by abandonment or abuse. Beneath the veil of peace and union, society forsakes, faults, then demonizes people who need the most help. Mass incarceration is a moral crisis that demands reimagining the criminal justice system, beginning with allocating more resources to community programs and places that enable mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical wellbeing for all people.
Following the end credits of Just Mercy, I deliberated on society’s responsibility to the individual. Herbert Richardson entered the war traumatized and disenfranchised as a low-income Black man in America, and he left with the same burdens as well as an acquired disability. Before the murder, Richardson did not receive the noble welcome that awaited his white compatriots in a war that devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people for generations. Afterwards, per routine for virtually all people of color and low-income people who were convicted of a crime, society definitively branded him as a low-life. His disposal was so thorough that I had difficulty finding any sources about Richardson unrelated to Just Mercy: a low-life must be erased from civilization. It is curious how in a society that praises free speech, people are quick to silence and demonize anyone accused of crime with little or no regard to their lived experiences. As a reflection of the public consciousness, the New York Times discarded Richardson on the eighth page of its August 19, 1989 issue, with the only mention of his past being his three-year service “in Vietnam as a technician in ‘a forward area.’” The piece began, “A murderer who was married in a prison ceremony last week was executed in Alabama’s electric chair early today for the slaying of an 11-year-old girl. The 43-year-old convict, Herbert Lee Richardson, was pronounced dead at 12:14 A.M….”
The article, beneath a looming image of a gun-wielding police officer advancing past a tearful little girl, acknowledges neither the humanity nor the psychological health of Richardson in its opening. Although the visual relates to a different homicide, its position sets a fearful tone in the reader before their eyes gaze downward. While in the sentence the writer recognizes the victim’s personhood, Richardson is a “murderer” before he is a man. Although mentioning Richardson’s marriage could be affirming his humanity, the context of this introduction suggests otherwise. His marriage was confined within guarded walls, supervised by prison officials, and, considering the syntax of the first sentence, literally installed between his transgression and death. The brief description of Richardson’s “prison ceremony” does not mitigate the distaste with which the writer describes him. If the intention of the author was to remind the audience of Richardson, the person, then they would have explicitly acknowledged Richardson as a man—a Black, disenfranchised, mentally unwell man at that—who perhaps married the love of his life before he died.
With terms such as “slaying” and “convict” also villainizing Richardson, the author frames the veteran as a remorseless killer who belongs in prison. The Times did not acknowledge the hostile environments that traumatize people like Richardson whose coping mechanisms inevitably engender that violence—whether internally, interpersonally, or both.
Such violence can be prevented with proper care from familial, communal, and societal structures. A person cannot heal when the people who are legally supposed to support them do not even attempt to understand them in the context of their lived experiences and the influence of environments in which they grew up.
During a robbery on March 23, 2017, Adam Christopher Lawson Jr. battered a loving wife and mother of five to death in her own home. After six years in prison for burglary, Lawson returned under a life sentence for first-degree murder, grand theft auto, and possession of a firearm. Most news outlets would likely introduce the story of Lawson and Deborah Liles, the victim, in a similar manner. However, Lawson’s backstory offers crucial insight into his decisions, as The Marshall Project reports:
Repeatedly abandoned as a toddler with no food for days at a time. Found wandering on a highway at age 4. Sibling died in a house fire. Sexually abused, whipped with extension cords, placed in more than 20 different foster homes. Attempted suicide at age 13 because, he said, “nobody wanted him”… As a little boy, he’d ingested drugs left out by his mother, who was incarcerated more than once on drug-related charges. As a teenager, he stole to feed his drug habit and repeatedly blacked out—and once had to be hospitalized after an overdose.
This man’s most formative years were brutal, to say the least. Every person has autonomy, but we cannot ignore the impact one’s environment has on their psyche. When summoned to a restorative justice intervention with the surviving Lileses, Lawson was petrified by the devastating repercussions of his actions. Legs fidgeting, he held his head in his hands while he intoned: “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. After what I’ve taken from them? I can’t …” Can you imagine Adam Christopher Lawson Jr., the now 27-year-old Black man described above, living mentally and emotionally well without any therapy or loving support? You do not have to imagine it: the information you read asserts that the answer is no. Lawson experienced a succession of abuses that all but negate the work of any singular encouraging figure in his life. A complicated past cannot be healed by one co-curricular program or a year of therapy. Although beneficial, these solutions must be complemented with the recognition of trauma, removal or pacification of triggering spaces as well as actively meaningful activities and people in one’s life. People who lack affirmation and positive, healthy stimulation will reproduce the conditions that derailed their lives.
As people who feel entitled to judge others, we often make decisions based on impressions riddled with events unbeknownst to us. The assumption that every person has the same privileges—we may not even realize that these are privileges—or backgrounds that we do has long misled how society perceives alleged criminals. Lawson is not broken by his own fault, but by the failure of the schools, social welfare programs, community centers, and local government that shaped his youth.
Incarceration is a war on poor and neglected peoples who lack essential resources and suffer from unattended health issues. From our insensitive language to stop-and-frisks, we, as a society, target and remove those who do not fit the vision of neoliberal capitalism—poor people, people of color, and neurodivergent people—from sight. This removal utilizes several strategies including incarceration, residential segregation, and denied entrance to work, social, or educational institutions. We impose our failure to provide universal basic needs onto individuals such as Richardson and Lawson who regularly navigate life-threatening situations in the most underresourced and oppressed communities of this nation. Our shortcomings suffocate the lives of the “illegals,” “thugs,” and “criminals” among us, who are overrepresented in our incarcerated population and underrepresented in the governing body. In lacking this platform amid the respected echelons of society, peoples’ humanity, including that of nonincarcerated people of color, is up for argument as news anchors and civilians toss this racialized language within quotidian conversation without critically considering the oppressive systems that shape peoples’ decisions. Thus, these individuals are rendered virtually helpless to their own liberation, not from prisons, but from loans, food deserts, closed hospitals, sharecropping, dilapidated schools, and abusive spaces. People who are forced to prioritize survival must be the first to receive more financial, political, and communal support from society. Until we embrace this framework, people will continue the cycle of trauma.
I yearn for the day when people will be able to pursue their interests, access culturally-appropriate support for their well-being, and live without the threat of police or incarceration. To reach this place, obsolete punishment cannot persist and the concept of “law and order” must be replaced with a culture of prevention and healing. A person’s history should not excuse their crime, but it offers a clue to how we can help that person heal and prevent other people from making similar mistakes. Homicides transform lives and traumatize, but so does abandonment. We should opt for rehabilitation and understanding, rather than punitive law, to avoid reproducing the same conditions that traumatized the person convicted of crime. Let us not be a nation held together by the guise of safety with unkept promises and abandoned families bursting at the seams. Today, we can begin to discuss and engage with incarcerated peoples—not as inmates, detainees, criminals, or statistics, but as people—to invent a system that strives to include, understand, and nurture every person within its reach. This achievement might just redeem the United States of America.
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