A NEW JUSTICE LEXICON
Far from being neutral or objective, language helps formulate and codify societal attitudes and perceptions. Written and visual language about justice in America has long dehumanized and stigmatized the more than 70 million Americans impacted by the justice system, and contributed to forging policies, practices, and systems that impose trauma, create barriers to financial well-being and civic reintegration, promote recidivism, and waste precious talent and resources.
As justice advocate Eddie Ellis decried in “An Open Letter to Our Friends on the Language of Criminal Justice” (2000), institutionalized language in the American vernacular like “prisoner”, “inmate”, “ex-con”, “offender” impose indelible negative identities that prevent basic human indignity.
Practitioners in media, government, and academia, and others with a large public platform, play an outsized role in influencing social attitudes and public policy. Consider the reductive labels of “tough on crime” vs. “soft on crime” pedaled in nearly every election, and the now infamous 1998 television ad featuring Willie Horton run by George H.W. Bush’s campaign. Horton had committed two violent felonies while on furlough from prison under a program in Massachusetts, where Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis was governor. While the ad is credited with helping Bush overcome a lead in the polls by painting Dukakis as “soft on crime”, many critics cite how the imagery and language of the ad framed and further solidified in the American psyche the Black male as predator, and thereby laid the groundwork for the 1994 Crime Bill that pressed the gas pedal on mass incarceration.
More than 20 years after Mr. Ellis’s letter, discriminatory language around justice remains, most troubling in reports and media stories that otherwise support reform.
Prism Reform calls on leaders across sectors to work together to create new universal standards for justice-aligned language that conforms to the foundational American ideals of equity, equal opportunity, and personal and collective integrity.