Michelle Jones served 20 years in prison for a heinous crime: murdering her 4-year-old son.
All through her two decades in prison, Ms. Jones gathered a record of achievement that would be amazing notwithstanding for somebody who had never been locked up. She distributed a scholarly article on the primary detainment facilities for ladies in the United States.
She composed a play that will open in December in an Indianapolis theater. She drove a group of imprisoned ladies whose endeavors won the Indiana Historical Society’s prize for best research venture for 2016.
The greater part of this helped Ms. Jones pick up admission at N.Y.U’s doctoral program in America, where she began a week ago. Yet, Ms. Jones’ shocking record wasn’t adequate for top directors at Harvard University.
In an uncommon move, they toppled the history department’s affirmation and rejected Ms. Jones.
The question now is, how true is the belief of having a and total redemption after a life of incarceration. Ms Jones seemed to have paid for her crime and have gone a step further by founding a better life for herself, but how feasible is this new life she is trying to forge?
But Harvard’s rejection of Ms. Jones (and Yale, rejected her as well, though the reasons remain unclear) is more than that. It reveals the truth about why mass punishment persists and the lie we are telling ourselves about the possibility of redemption.
I suspect that the administrators and professors who helped block Ms. Jones’s admission are a lot like my friends in Connecticut and California. They consider themselves liberal, and they think mass incarceration is a problem.