“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail
The hollow thunk of my footstep is followed by the blaring, racing beep of the metal detector. “Next,” the correctional officer commands, beckoning me forward with his right hand. My arms raise themselves on instinct as his gloved hands frisk me. No words need to be uttered for me to open my notebook upside down. The pages slap each other as I shake it; no papers, razors, or foreign objects fall. “Okay, next!” he orders, dismissing me with a small nod. I mutter a “thank you” and join the others in the small room between freedom and subjection.
Every Thursday at 4:30 p.m., ten other Swarthmore students and I take Professor of Political Science Keith Reeves’ “History & Politics of Punishment” course at the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center (PICC) with around sixteen women in jail. Though at first an unnerving experience, weighed down by fear of the unknown and a mountain of stigma, I knew then as I know now that it would change my life for the better. Like Dr. King, I have always felt that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Growing up in Venezuela, I was surrounded by political turmoil and government violence. I experienced power outages lasting up to ten days, food shortages, water scarcity, and restricted access to education — which itself is a privilege in a country with an average secondary school enrollment of 63%. This instability stemmed from protests that lasted for what seemed like endless months and resulted in hundreds dead at the hands of Maduro’s oppressive regime.
Because of this brutality, I became part of the 7.2 million Venezuelans living in exile since 2014 and have no viable way of ever visiting the country of my childhood again.
The violence I witnessed and experienced in Venezuela was not isolated from the rest of the globe; the United Nations (UN) has condemned the regime with their words but has been incapable of handling, or maybe even complacent to, human rights violations that continue to this day.
The UN Security Council is the main body in charge of managing crises in a manner that upholds the UN’s broader goal of global peace — it has the power to facilitate negotiations, impose sanctions, and authorize the use of force. However, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, it has “long faced calls for reform … [with critics saying that its] outdated composition undermines its legitimacy and the increasing use of the veto inhibits its functionality.”
A dysfunctional UN Security Council has failed to adequately address the countless crises Venezuela has experienced in recent decades. If the organization built to “maintain international peace and security, give humanitarian assistance to those in need, protect human rights, and uphold international law” is incapable of fulfilling its duties in Venezuela, how likely is it that it will rise to the occasion elsewhere? What are the implications of these shortcomings globally?
Despite the pain and anger perpetually aflame in me, fed by the glowing embers of my past, I am grateful to have also been endowed with a robust sense of justice that has had room to flourish at Swarthmore College. When the incarcerated women we spoke to, my “inside classmates,” revealed to me that they receive four pads — which would last little over a day if they were to follow the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists’ advice — for the entirety of their periods I know that this is cruel and unusual punishment; it is unjust.
This treatment of inmates continues because we have collectively decided that health and dignity should be reserved for those beyond bars. And yet, any one of us could find ourselves at the mercy of the criminal justice system with a misstep, an ignorant move, or even a wrongful conviction. The crimes my inside classmates have committed do not determine their humanity, and we must work collectively, at Swarthmore and beyond, to reconcile our views of inmates as “outsiders.”
