Think about where you’ll be in 2048.

That’s 25 years from now. You’ll probably have met a lot of people, gone to a lot of places, done a lot of things. Maybe you’ll have gotten a new job — or multiple — by that point. Maybe your family will have expanded. Maybe either of these things will have caused you to start calling a new place, somewhere you’ve never been yet, “home.” Technology will probably look pretty different. The political landscape, too.

That could be the next time Jeffrey Everett sees the outside world. As of 2023, Everett is 35 years old. He might not see the outside world again until 2048, by which time, he’ll be 60, and people will have been born, have gotten their drivers’ licenses, gone to and graduated from college, and started working.

Jury duty

The jury summons for his case was the third one I had received after postponing service for out-of-state school and summer work. 

Leading up to jury duty, I was a little excited to participate in such an adult activity. That said, I was also expecting to be disappointed: all I had ever heard about jury duty was that it was boring and a nuisance and maybe I could get out of it by saying I [insert excuse here]. On the first day, I brought a book (a murder mystery, the only genre of book I can reliably stay engaged with), headphones, and paper to draw on, but the day was short, and we were dismissed by lunchtime. 

The next day, I brought a sandwich in addition to my book, headphones, and paper to draw on. The next day, I stopped bringing my book. And I quickly stopped reading it altogether because the thought of crimes and police and evidence and suspects horrified me when they no longer only lived on a page but in real life and had real ramifications for a real man with real aspirations and real friends and family.

When I was little, I had an intense fear of going to jail. I thought that it was a nearly unavoidable part of existing in the world, despite not closely knowing anyone who had ever been arrested. In fact, the only person I knew of personally was the mother of a little blonde girl I was friends with in fourth grade, who allegedly convinced the cops that she was the sister of someone famous and therefore got off scot-free. She told the story with pride.

Eventually, as I grew up, I realized that I was no longer even thinking about that old fear because getting arrested takes specific, illegal actions that are actually pretty easy to avoid.

I can say and think that these things are “pretty easy to avoid” because of factors that I don’t control about who I am and how I grew up. I’m Asian-American and have an emotionally supportive and financially stable family in a safe area with access to good education and transportation and the list goes on. While none of this precludes me (or others in similar situations) from crime and punishment, the risk factors are in my favor.

The recent narratives, especially in more liberal circles, about the criminal justice system and incarcerated people are probably different from the ones people heard a few decades ago. 

The ‘70s in America marked the beginning of an era characterized, in part, by “tough on crime” policies. Sparked by Nixon’s “war on drugs” and amplified during Reagan’s administration — the Brennan Center for Justice points to the near doubling (329,000 to 627,000 people) of the prison population during his terms — leading to what we now know as mass incarceration. 

Since then, we’ve heard the alleged confession from political aide John Ehrlichman regarding President Nixon’s war on drugs and realized that not only is mass incarceration ineffective, but it exacerbates social injustices and may even increase crime rates as a result of collateral upheaval. 

So I’m saying (understating) nothing new when I say that the criminal “justice” system isn’t working.

Everett had six charges against him. One each for attempted murder (charge 1) and assault (charge 3), and two each for drugs (charges 5 and 6) and guns (charges 2 and 4). There were probably about fifteen witnesses, and about ten of them were police officers. Most, if not all, of the officers were white men, and all except one had neglected to turn on their government-mandated body cams. There were twelve jurors plus two alternates. Of the fourteen, five of us were people of color (three Asian and two Black), and I don’t think any of us were from the same neighborhood as him. 

We all had biases that we were asked to put to the side. We all had beliefs about the criminal justice system and the laws that we were asked to ignore and instead to accept the law as it was given to us. We all had lives that we wanted to return to and guilt over what we were doing.

I am quite confident that he did the things we found him guilty on (counts 2, 3, 5, and 6, for anyone keeping track), but finding him guilty on these things didn’t feel like justice.

Sure, actions have consequences. But it felt like he was facing the consequences of more than his actions: it felt like he was facing the consequences of his circumstances. It felt like we were addressing the symptoms rather than the source of hurt and that the only thing we accomplished was creating more hurt in the process.

So, what’s with this project?

I wonder what could have happened if we had nullified the law. I wonder what the process could have looked like under a more humane system. I wonder how his life would look different if he had been born a few streets or towns over or if he grew up in a community with better social, educational, and economic support. I wonder how things could have looked if we cared about people and acted like it.

So I designed this project as a way to think, learn, and communicate things about criminal justice system. After the intimate look at the process of trial by jury that I received, I basically wanted a project that would let me learn more about how the system works (and how it doesn’t work). And I started to do that, limiting the scope to Massachusetts for feasibility, but even with this limitation, there are a lot of different aspects to the system that I wasn’t able to capture or even start looking at. For instance, the questions of private prisons, life without parole, juvenile issues and the school-to-prison pipeline, criminalization and overrepresentation in the system of Indigenous people, the right to vote, perspectives from public safety officers, perspectives from many dozens of more community organizations working to change the system, and much more that I haven’t even thought of. 

This paper also faces a huge limitation based on whom I contacted and spoke with. I interviewed about seven people, all of whom are educated women and six of whom are white. This caveat is not to suggest that their experiences are somehow invalid or less valuable but rather to acknowledge that there are many important perspectives that I failed to represent in this piece. 

I still have no taste for any crime-related media, but I don’t wince as strongly when driving down Everett Road (a road near my house in Albany), and I’ve stopped thinking about how Everett probably won’t have the simple freedom of opening the refrigerator door and finding something to eat for the next couple dozen years. But that doesn’t change the fact that by the time you’ve finished reading this preface, Jeffrey Everett is probably still in prison. And he’ll probably still be there long after you forget his name.