{"id":1784,"date":"2013-11-05T16:07:59","date_gmt":"2013-11-05T22:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/?p=1784"},"modified":"2014-02-12T11:30:02","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T17:30:02","slug":"we-are-all-criminals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/2013\/11\/05\/we-are-all-criminals\/","title":{"rendered":"We Are All Criminals"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"purse\"<\/a>Few (if any) of us have abstained from crime completely. And recognizing our own criminality is often an important first step in understanding the situation of those who are caught and punished for crimes. I use self-report delinquency surveys to show this commonality to my students, but the traveling exhibit\u00a0We Are All Criminals<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>makes the point far more emphatically.<\/p>\n

The multimedia project tells our stories — the millions of people who have committed felonies and misdemeanors but managed to avoid the stigma of a criminal record. Its architect is\u00a0Emily Baxter, a visionary Minnesota attorney and Director of Public Policy and Advocacy at the Council on Crime and Justice. From the site:<\/p>\n

Participants in We Are All Criminals tell stories of crimes they got away with…\u00a0<\/em>The participants are doctors and lawyers, social workers and students, retailers and retirees who consider how very different their lives could have been had they been caught. The photographs, while protecting participants\u2019 identities, convey personality: each is taken in the participant\u2019s home, office, crime scene, or neighborhood.\u00a0<\/em>The stories are of youth, boredom, intoxication, and porta potties. They are humorous, humiliating, and humbling in turn. They are privately held memories without public stigma; they are criminal histories without criminal records.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

We Are All Criminals seeks to challenge society\u2019s perception of what it means to be a criminal and how much weight a record should be given, when truly \u2013 we are all criminals. But it is also a commentary on the disparate impact of our state\u2019s policies, policing, and prosecution: many of the participants benefited from belonging to a class and race that is not overrepresented in the criminal justice system. Permanent and public criminal records perpetuate inequities, precluding thousands of Minnesotans from countless opportunities to move on and move up. We Are All Criminals questions the wisdom and fairness in those policies.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can see much of the project online<\/a>,\u00a0attend one of the public events<\/a>, or attend Ms. Baxter’s presentation<\/a>\u00a0at the American Society of Criminology meetings in Atlanta this November 23rd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Few (if any) of us have abstained from crime completely. And recognizing our own criminality is often an important first step in understanding the situation of those who are caught and punished for crimes. I use self-report delinquency surveys to show this commonality to my students, but the traveling exhibit\u00a0We Are All Criminals\u00a0makes the point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[124,15],"class_list":["post-1784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crime","tag-culture"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1784"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1791,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1784\/revisions\/1791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/pubcrim\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}