Events

Past Event

From the Inside Out: The Power of Language to Incarcerate

September 21, 2019
9:00 AM - 7:00 PM
Andrew Freedman Home, 1125 Grand Concourse, Bronx, NY 10452
The Center for Justice at Columbia University and The Confined Arts present From the Inside Out: The Power of Language to Incarcerate, a one-day justice conference in New York City that will meet and resist linguistic methods of dehumanization, which foster implicit and explicit biases about people in the criminal justice system. The mission of the conference is to explore the attachment of labels used to describe individuals with justice system contact, which are coupled with negative imagery, and provide re-humanizing counter narratives using the power of storytelling to highlight true-lived experiences. More specifically, the audience will engage with stigmatized labels coupled with (mis)representative imagery and be given a historical context of how labels foster misconceptions about incarceration and the people that are incarcerated.

This conference demonstrates the urgent need to facilitate discourse around dehumanizing labels, linguistic rights, and language marginalization for people in the criminal justice system. Further, it demonstrates the crucial importance of understanding how the general public forms perceptions of different groups of people based on the common language and labels used to reference them. Labels carry stigmas and stereotypes. They allow us to acknowledge social, cultural, or physical differences between one another. Labels also inadvertently influence our perceptions of one another depending on the social significance of the label that is attributed to a person.

The conference goals are to:

  1. Provide a historical review of how language and media has been used to shape public perceptions of people in the criminal justice system.
  2. Provide a historical review of how law, policy and popular discourse has shaped punitive attitudes.
  3. Understand how the popular (current) philosophy of justice and incarceration and current media representation of people in prison in the US intersects with and is reflected in the law and policy of today.
  4. Determine the influences on public opinion of people in prison – is it the legal framework, popular media or personal opinion and experience?
  5. Provide re-humanizing counter narratives inspired by true-lived experiences.

Conference Objectives

  1. Present research information through performances and presentations
  2. Engage directly with dehumanizing language and imagery
  3. Facilitate public discourse to gain a better understanding of the influence of public opinion towards people in prison
  4. Present a call to action for all conference attendees

Conference Activities will include:

  1. Keynote Address by Pastor Isaac Scott
  2. Panel Discussions
  3. Breakout Sessions
  4. Arts Engagement: Performing Arts and Visual Arts

Learn more about the conference.

The Power of Language to Incarcerate flyer

Contact Information

Geraldine Downey
gdowney@psych.columbia.edu