This week in ethics, we’re thinking about the way that society punishes the people who do something that society deems wrong. We may be getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, because even though we’ve discussed a couple of ethical perspectives, we have lots of room left to discuss and evaluate what actually is right and wrong. But it’s not a bad idea to think about the stakes of making decisions about ethics. If we as a society decide something is wrong, what is the best way to respond to people who act against that decision? What are the consequences that come from different levels of harshness? What does the way that we treat “wrongdoers” say about the way that we view people in general?
Plus, since this class is using film to illustrate some of its questions, this topic is an opportunity to watch The Shawshank Redemption, which remains my favorite movie. The students usually respond well to it, too, and getting to see a bunch of people see it for the first time is its own thrill. There’s a scene in the movie where Andy Dufresne wants the warden to spend some money to upgrade the prison library. The warden replies that the public only wants the government to spend money on three things in prisons: more bars, more guards, and more guns. Andy is persistent, though, and gradually builds the prison library into a resource that helps at least a dozen prisoners get their high school diplomas. (He has some other projects in the film, but I won’t spoil those if you haven’t seen it.)
This NPR story about Folsom State Prison (made famous by Johnny Cash) from 2009 shows that conflict playing out in the real world – as we spend more money on bars and guards and guns, we spend less on educating and training convicts for life after prison. Whether that actually makes anyone safer or improves anyone’s life is a very open question. I like using this story because I can play the audio from the original radio story and give students the printed article version, so that gives students a couple of different paths to absorb the information. With the article in hand, I ask the students to answer a set of questions that connect to the prison-and-punishment theme. I also hope that thinking about the questions will help the students think about how the media can construct a story to support certain conclusions. It’s definitely worth listening to the story and thinking about what the story says – and doesn’t say – about the prison guards union.
I’ll put the reflection questions after the jump.
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