A Note from Jennifer Formichelli
Last Wednesday, as the capstone of Parents’ Day, a group of BUA and BU students and parents gathered to hear an extraordinary panel of speakers who generously gave their time, energy and expertise BUA in furtherance of our All-School Learning Experience on race, mass incarceration, and criminal justice. BU's Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground co-sponsored the talk, and Pedro Falci, their Associate Director, introduced and moderated it.
Each speaker approached the subject from his or her unique perspective. Jim Matesanz, who teaches in BU’s Criminal Justice program and runs BU’s prison education program, discussed his experience working as a Superintendent in the corrections system. Carlos Monteiro, Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Suffolk University, discussed six bold reforms toward ending mass incarceration. Leslie Walker, a lawyer and executive director at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts (PLSM), described working on behalf of prisoners’ civil rights. The panelists, encouraged by Pedro, held a fascinating conversation among themselves, and with the audience.
It is a hard and painful exercise to examine the American incarceration system. It is not an exercise in self-affirmation. The panel made it clear that we tend to ask the question backwards, when we should ask it forwards: not what do we say about mass incarceration, but what does our system of mass incarceration say about us?
Our students can see, and feel, vestiges of who we are now in the hatred of Pip (of Dickens’s Great Expectations, the capstone book of ninth-grade English) toward the convict Magwitch. Having raised him up in society and loved him like a father, Magwitch opens his arms to Pip when they are finally reunited in London, and Pip responds to Magwitch’s embrace with open revulsion: “The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the repugnance with which I shrunk from him, could not have been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast.”
It is only by learning to love Magwitch, a man who was, like Pip himself, an orphaned boy, that Pip learns what it means to be a true gentleman. He also learns what it means to love: “For, now, my repugnance to him had all melted away, and in the hunted wounded shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man who had meant to be my benefactor, who had felt affectionately, gratefully, and generously, toward me with a great constancy, through a series of years.”
Our common enterprise of this year’s All-School Learning Experience is a bold examination of one the most difficult matters in our society. May we face the challenge together not with fear, revulsion, or judgment; but instead may we have the heart to embrace it with open arms, in a spirit of learning, caring, and common humanity.
Best,
Dr. Jennifer Formichelli
English Teacher
