Prison and the just world fallacy

Recreation of Dr. King's prison cell
Recreation of Dr. King’s prison cell. National Civil Rights Museum. Image by Adam Jones, used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 30 Unported license.

Many Americans want to believe that anyone who is in prison deserves to be there. To differentiate themselves from people in prison, they cling to just world beliefs [opens in pdf]—i.e., the conviction that life is just, that good things happen to good people, and that bad things happen to bad people.

Just world beliefs can give people a sense of stability and reassurance–a belief that sooner or later they will be rewarded for their inherent if not always obvious goodness.

Just world beliefs can also be a barrier against empathy; they can shield people from feeling that they must do something to correct injustices—e.g., police brutality, racial profiling.

Yet we want to remind you that many people have been imprisoned–in this country as well as elsewhere–because they saw and challenged injustice and spoke truth to power.

To mention just a few:

  • Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Read his letter from a Birmingham jail.
  • Father Daniel Berrigan. See his interview with Amy Goodman.
  • Chelsea (Bradley) Manning. Learn more about the effort to obtain a pardon for Chelsea.

Dr. King, Father Berrigan, and other celebrated activists for peace and social justice have regained their freedom, but there are thousands of men and women in prison today who do not have the social and economic support to gain release. (See previous posts on prisons—and torture in prisons–in the continental United States and in Guantanamo Bay.)

To make the world a better place and to make our own country a better place, we need to begin by recognizing that a just world has not yet been achieved.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Preferring secrecy: Guantanamo

Transparency is a term seen increasingly in the media. Wikileaks, founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, is best known for releasing secret documents provided by Bradley Manning. Wikileaks, like many of the progressive online media sources, strives for transparency when people in power would prefer secrecy.

Consider this recent story from Al Jazeera: For over three months, more than 100 of the detainees at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, most of whom have never been accused of a crime and/or were actually cleared for release three years ago, have been on a hunger strike.

As one prisoner, Musa’ab Omar Al Madhwani, said, “Indefinite detention is the worst form of torture….I have no reason to believe that I will ever leave this prison alive. It feels like death would be a better fate than living in these conditions.”

Consider also the issue of forced feeding. In its Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikers, adopted in 1991 and revised in 2006 (in large part due to issues at Guantánamo), the World Medical Association states: “[f]orcible feeding is never ethically acceptable. Even if intended to benefit, feeding accompanied by threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints is a form of inhuman and degrading treatment”—and “inhuman and degrading treatment” violates the United Nations Convention on Human Rights, which the U.S. helped develop and has ratified.

Some people argue that it is more humane to force feed prisoners than to let them die in protest of their treatment. But are there not alternatives to these two extremes, alternatives that are consistent with human rights principles?

If Americans want to live in a truly democratic society, we need:

  • Information about inhumanity and injustice being perpetrated by Americans
  • The opportunity to reflect on the inhumanity and injustice and its alternatives
  • The will to consider and promote alternatives.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology