Week 3 Discussion CJYO 2013 / Student Quotes

Photograph from Denver Post / "Three Suspects Held
in Slaying of Denver Teen Reysean Abram"

Quote by Cristie Horvath / CJYO 2013 Student

I do my best to keep up with current events, especially those which are directly related to my field of study, however I search for news articles far less often than I ought to because I don’t want to be susceptible to placing all my stock into the media’s spin on things.  As Josephine Metcalf stated in From Rage to Rap and Prison to Print, “Gang scholars Klein and Martin Jankowski raise awareness of the powerful and influential role of all media in affecting public opinion on gangs.  They criticize the media’s tendency to lean towards sensationalized news coverage of gangs in order to stimulate audience interest.”  (Metcalf, 2009, p. 13) I have always believed that the media omits or emphasizes certain points in their stories and sometimes embellishes actual facts in order to make the target audience feel one way or another based on the message they are wanting to convey at the time and we never get to see the big picture, unless they want us to that is.  One of the other dilemmas that arise with attempting to keep up with current events while in the field of criminal justice is that there unfortunately is a lot of crime being broadcast in the news and it is nearly impossible to keep up to date with everything.  There is a reason the saying “if it bleeds, it leads” is so popular in newsrooms across America.

There is a story that garnered national media attention several years ago, which changed some of my opinions and perceptions of the criminal justice system a great deal.  It was regarding the Casey Anthony trial in which she was accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter Caylee Anthony.  I don’t have anything specific to quote from the judicial and media circus that ensued, but I did include a link in my works cited of a string of articles regarding Casey Anthony.  In a nutshell - there was a lot of damning evidence compiled against her, along with some evidence erroneously overlooked that came to light later, Casey was fabricating under oath many different unrelated stories that had more holes in them than Swiss cheese, and was blaming everyone, except herself, for the death of that 2-year-old innocent child.  I personally believe that she is guilty and I feel that the investigation and trial were so mishandled that a truly evil person and criminal escaped facing the consequences of their actions that day.

There was no ounce of justice in this faux pas of a case.  It made me realize that oftentimes our system is not a perfect one and not just in the fact that this travesty occurred, but also in the fact that said system has directly as well as indirectly let down and failed a limitless number of people since it’s inception – the juveniles that are locked away and forgotten about out of sight out of mind, the innocents that somehow have found themselves in the grips of an institution for crimes they never committed, the wisp of an education system we have leftover from pouring most of our funding into our corrections system instead (we spend more money on corrections than education each year in this nation; my 5-year-old son who recently started Kindergarten has to share his teacher and one aide with 27 other students who are all expected to read and write at a 1^st grade level by the end of the school year, we have teachers who don’t have enough seats or supplies for the amount of children they have been assigned in a single classroom, and our elementary school cannot even afford a tarp to cover their playground equipment to shield the little ones from the hot, blistering desert sun and to prevent scalding metal from injuring them.)  I think our system has lost its way in some aspects and I hope that in our lifetime we can get it on the right track.  I agree with Rodriguez in Hearts and Hands when he says, “All this, and the increased prison building at the expense of colleges and jobs, is a misdirection of social energies.”  (Rodriguez, 2003, p. 45)

I selected two current correlated articles from 2013 (the links are in the works cited section below) that I feel are relevant to our readings this week.  The first article is titled “Three Suspects Held in Slaying of Denver Teen Reysean Abram” and the second is “Gang Fears Prompt East, Manual High Schools to Close.”  Both articles were taken from The Denver Post.  The former discusses how a passing vehicle gunned down a 13-year-old boy named Raysean Abram while he was outside a party he was attending while on his bicycle.  The first article hints at the fact that the media believes gang violence was a factor in Reysean’s death, but was not explicit in saying so forthright.  The article indirectly accuses gang violence as the perpetrator.  It also doesn’t try to get to the heart of the matter and find out why this tragedy happened, or what could be done to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.  The most it scrapes upon is saying, “His mother said Reysean ‘jumped in’ but his involvement did not go further than that.  She said she had become concerned by what looked like mounting tensions in some of her son’s Facebook postings.  Reysean himself appears to be flashing signs in some of his photos.”  (Gurman 2013) The media seemed to take a “oh well this is gang violence for you and it happens all the time, now let’s move on” stance on the issue though there was a missed opportunity for them to delve beneath the surface and peel back the layers to expose the core issues at hand.  The latter of the two articles listed was written a few days later and clarified that Raysean had died due to suspected gang activity and highlights how he associated with the Crips as well as engaged in “gang-like” activity via social media.  After that his story seems to fall off the map and is forgotten by the media save for an archived tale that is stumbled upon from time to time.

The Denver Post missed out on opportunities to deliver a powerful message to their community.  How did this 13-year-old find himself in this situation?  Why was he identifying with gangs?  What could we (as a community have done to help him)?  What can we do better as a community in the future to help youths like him?  It seemed as if the media and society had cast Reysean Abram aside as if he didn’t matter anymore.  In Hearts and Hands Rodriguez said the following, “They organized to protect themselves within a society that had no place for them.”  (Rodriguez, 2003, p. 31)” This reminded me of Reysean.  He felt he had no one to go to and was crying out for help through social media and in his actions and words, but no one saw and society did not seem to have the time to care.  “If this kid would have had this kind of support in life, he would be here today.”  (Gurman, Robles 2013)  Like Rodriguez writes in The Long Run (new introduction to Always Running), “Ramiro is one of the statistics, although he’s not a number to me – he’s my son.”  (Rodriguez, 2005, p. xvi) Reysean is not just a statistic in the UCR (Uniform Crime Report) - he is a brother, a son, a cousin, a neighbor, a friend, and many more things to many more people and we should not forget the Reysean’s, Tino’s, and Angel’s of the world.  It is our duty to help them.

-Cristie Horvath