One of the things I’ve always struggled with is the ability to conceptualize. It’s very easy to hear the statistics surrounding incarcerated youth and recognize how negative effects spanning whole lives can stem from it, but it’s much harder for me to understand the extent and feeling to which this can actually affect people on the individual level. This is something I aim to change about myself, but I also want to quickly discuss it.
The main reason the photography collection ‘How The Other Half Lives‘ was so impactful is because it didn’t just share that a problem existed, it thoroughly documented just what consequences that problem had wrought in a way too vivid for anyone to ignore. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I wish this blatant display of problematic results was far more pronounced in the curriculum for my pre-college program about how the juvenile justice and child welfare systems affect those who go through it.
The course is wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but there are many times where relaying the side of humans and citing statistics are not done in a balanced fashion. And to me, this makes it so much harder to actually understand what it is I’m learning about. It is my humble opinion that statistics need to be grounded within a humanistic approach to the issue instead of as factoids and numbers in a vacuum.
Jason Pargin’s article “What is the Monkeysphere?” does a very good job of explaining this concept, and also does it in a far more humerous way than I could ever manage to.
Also, the libraries here are great. I feel like I’ve been spending more time there than in the dorms.