The Final Installment (Writings in Philosophy, III)

The Epistemic Injustice of our Prison System

Epistemic Injustice refers to unfairness due to aspects of knowledge, how it is communicated, and how it is understood. What happens when epistemic injustice occurs within our prison system? Do prisoners still have the same rights that regular citizens do? For example, the First Amendment guarantees the right to freedom of speech. In this paper it is my goal to help the reader understand the testimonial injustices that are inflicted upon people after they enter the prison system, and the society of social injustice and prejudice that exists in prisons.

Joseph Dole states that Testimonial Injustice can occur when a person who is giving testimony in any form (whether spoken or written) unjustly receives a credibility deficit in the mind of the hearer/reader based on some conscious or unconscious bias about that person's social identity.  The testimonial injustice perpetuated within the prison system strips away the identity of prisoners. According to Mr. Dole:

Testimonial injustices perpetrated upon people in prison are especially egregious because we are powerless, already occupy the lowest societal station, and have so little left. Not only are we devoid of power, but we are at the mercy of those in power on a daily, minute-by-minute basis. Every day in America, this power dynamic results in an incarnated people dying due to medical neglect, excessive force by guards, or just plain unsanitary and inhumane living conditions

We see here according to Mr. Dole that epistemic injustice is in full effect because it has completely silenced the voice of those in jail trying to tell their story. According to Mr. Dole, there is almost no protection from the courts because of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which encourages the demonization and dehumanization of prisoners by the media. In the end Mr. Dole states that those in prison suffer a credibility deficit far greater than any other single stereotype because they are now seen and labeled as a criminal .

What we are seeing here according to Mr. Dole is the works of identity injustice, and Miranda Fricker notes: "Whenever there is an operation of power that depends in some significant degree upon such shared imaginative conceptions of social identity, then identity power is at work." In other words, identity power influences the social perceptions of people from a young age, leading them to see those who are in prison as evil or untrustworthy, and this is what Fricker means when she talks about constitutive construction.  Most stereotypes of prisoners are negative, and when prisoners attempt to defend themselves from accusations or prove they are ready for parole, they face pre-emptive injustice. Pre-emptive injustice according to Mrs. Fricker is the credibility of such a person on a given subject matter that is already sufficiently prejudiced deficit that their potential testimony is never solicited; so, the speaker is silenced by the identity prejudice that undermines his/her credibility in advance. In other words, the accused are not able to defend themselves because people in the jury have already made their decision before entering the testimonial exchange.

To give another example that might help give a better understanding of Pre-emptive injustice, in Ava DuVernay and Spencer Averick's documentary film entitled "13TH" they give us an example of how racial and pre-emptive injustice overruled testimonial injustice and ultimately caused a travesty to happen to a young man named Kalief Browder. Kalief Browder was like any other sixteen-year-old young man coming home from a party when he was stopped by the police and arrested due to an incident, he had no involved in. As a result, he was tried and treated like an adult and sent to Riker's Prison for three years. While waiting for a trial Kalief was abused by his cellmates and the prison guards. Two years later, Kalief was released, but the psychological effects of his incarceration led him to take his own life in 2015.

Kalief experienced testimonial injustice, and  also an act of intrinsic injustice as well, and according to Miranda Fricker: "The fact that the primary injustice involves insult to someone in respect of a capacity essential to human value lends even its least harmful instances a symbolic power that adds a layer of harm to its own; the epistemic wrong bears a social meaning to the effect that the subject is less than fully human. When someone suffers a testimonial injustice, they are degraded qua knower, and they are symbolically degraded qua human."  Fricker is inserting that when one suffers injustice (be it testimonial, pre-emptive, intrinsic, etc..) it completely breaks down their knowledgeable intellect and then their human intellect as another layer of whatever else that individual might be dealing with. In the case of Kalief Browder he suffered both because he was falsely accused of a crime he did not commit, was racially profiled because he "fit" the description of a thief that was given to the police, was sent to prison when found guilty, and was silenced because he was not given the chance to defend himself, and as a result his power (as an individual human), and identity as a citizen of the United States was stripped from him.