By Spike Bradford
Having worked as an auto mechanic, I often think of criminal and juvenile justice issues the way a mechanic would: as an interacting web of systems. After all, a car is simply a series of systems (ignition, electrical, drive, etc.). The mechanical term that has been in my mind lately is “insulation breakdown.” This usually involves stripped wires or damaged circuits or anything that allows current to go where it’s not supposed to. In short (pun intended), this is a bad thing.
Having worked as an auto mechanic, I often think of criminal and juvenile justice issues the way a mechanic would: as an interacting web of systems. After all, a car is simply a series of systems (ignition, electrical, drive, etc.). The mechanical term that has been in my mind lately is “insulation breakdown.” This usually involves stripped wires or damaged circuits or anything that allows current to go where it’s not supposed to. In short (pun intended), this is a bad thing.
Working in criminal and juvenile
justice reform-minded research, I experience “insulation breakdown” of a
different sort on a daily basis; a good kind of “insulation breakdown.” You
see, unlike many that work in my field, I am not from a disproportionately
impacted community of color or close to people who have been negatively affected
by what I know to be our broken, arbitrary and institutionally racist systems
of justice. I am a middle-class, highly educated, Volvo-driving, NPR-listening
white guy. In other words, I’m insulated. Insulated in a way that most
Americans are when it comes to understanding criminal and juvenile justice in
our country.
