Credibility of Information

A. Hanson
Paris 2009

For my Gospel and Global Media Culture class this week we were asked to reflect on credibility of information with regards to authority, authenticity, and agency.  We used the case study of criminal justice and how it has been portrayed in the media.

My undergraduate degree is in Communications, so I approach pretty much all mass communication with a hermeneutic of suspicion.  I am always thinking about the source of a message and the intended outcome of the message.  Communications do not happen in a vacuum and they cause things to happen.  The easiest examples of this are advertisements.  In particular, look at those for prescription drugs.  

It becomes a little more insidious when we look at propaganda campaigns.  Propaganda is a dirty word to some people, but I am using it in its most genuine sense right now, the presenting of only one side of an issue in order to gain support for a certain viewpoint.  One of my favorite examples of this that I studied during my undergraduate years was the documentary, Atomic Cafe, which is a collection of film clips produced by the US government to assure citizens that the atomic bomb was not a threat to them and to quell some of the hysteria around it.  The documentary is offered without much commentary from the filmmakers, but archival footage from the government is interspersed with coverage of the actual effects of the nuclear arms race on humanity. It is a fantastic film.  I highly recommend it.  But I digress.

 For our case study this week, criminal justice, I am going to posit that the United States is engaged in propaganda.  As a nation we like to use military terms to show that we are really serious about something, "War on Terror", "War on Poverty", "War on Drugs."  Our country is one that likes nothing more than to rally around a cause, particularly one with patriotic overtones, and be righteously indignant about it.  The War on Drugs was said to have started with Richard Nixon in 1971, who was concerned by drug use among returning Vietnam war vets.  Of course substance abuse is a major issue and no one is going to argue that. It destroys lives and communities.  Drug use brings catastrophic damage to communities, including property crime and violent crime such as rape and murder.

But where we went wrong was in our own telling of this story.  Drugs and crime are systemic problems, rooted in racism, inequality with regards to healthcare and education, and generational poverty.  Locking up offenders for drug offenses is merely putting a bandaid on an arterial bleed.  Yet as a nation we are locked into the idea of "progress at any cost" and getting "tough on crime" fits into the mythology that we tell ourselves.  If we get one low-level drug dealer or gang kid off the streets and into jail, we feel like we have done something great.

And the media tells this story over and over again.  Which is why we need to be critical about the places from where our information comes.  Who is putting it out there and why?  And where is the money coming from?  And in a context collapse such as with the advent of social media, we need to be ever more careful about what Rheingold calls the "echo chamber effect" in his Crap Detector Chapter in Net Smart or repeating only that which agrees with our own personal convictions.  We want to believe that our world is getting better and safer and more prosperous.  So we repeat only those things that affirm that.  We want our communities to be safe, so we look at what might contribute to that and getting offenders off the streets seems to fit with that. So we repeated half-hearted success stories to convince ourselves that something is really improving.

The Charlie Rose Interview on Incarceration tells a different story.  Not only is mass incarceration (incarceration as social control rather than criminal justice) not effective, the problem is FAR bigger than we ever could have imagined.  There is an entire industry built up around prisons (privatization) and systematic racism is rampant.  Our propaganda is all lies.

So what do we do as people of faith?  We speak truth to power just as we have been called to do all along.  The ELCA draft Social Statement on Criminal Justice (set to be voted upon at the churchwide assembly in August 2013) outlines some moves forward.  It outlines the problem and calls Christians to "confess that we, as individuals and in our common life together, have fallen short in responding to criminal justice--both in respond to crime's harm and to problems in the justice system."  It outlines four responses, hearing cries of injustice, showing hospitality, offering accompaniment and engaging in advocacy.  It calls to renewed ministry on behalf victims and their families, the incarcerated and their families, affected communities and those who work in the system.

Because Jesus says it best in Matthew 25:36, "I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me.  I was in prison and you visited me."

God is among the least of us.  Meaning God is most surely present with those in prison.  The second that we start drawing lines between ourselves and the other, God is always on the side of the other.

End of the line

I noticed an interesting phenomenon several years ago, the last time I worked in social services, and have noticed it again this year.  Most of us in this field are in it because we genuinely care about other people and want to be of service.  Along with that comes an unwillingness to be at the "end of the line."  Let me explain what this means...

When someone is seeking services (rent assistance, food, gas vouchers, etc), and visits a specific agency, no social worker at that agency wants to ultimately deny services and be at the "end of the line."  The thinking goes, if my agency doesn't have that service and/or funding, I will just give you the name of another agency, and they might have it.  Because I want to give you something.  It feels really awful to say to someone, "I really can't help you, and unfortunately, no one else can either."  My agency is often the "end of the line" for a lot of services.  We are the largest provider of energy assistance in the state of Colorado, provide a substantial amount of rental assistance, as well as we are one of the only agencies left in Denver that provides assistance with bus tokens.  So, we find ourselves in that position a lot.  If we can't help you, there is no other agency that is going to be able to help you either. 

When I worked at the agency serving homeless women several years ago, I will admit that I was one of those people who pushed clients onto other agencies and let that other organization do the unpleasant work of telling someone that they could just not be helped.  Somehow it felt better to be able to offer my clients something, even if that was just a phone number to another agency.  However, now being on the receiving end of many of those "referrals", I have a different view.  Not only does it put the case manager in a terrible position, but it ultimately does not serve the client either. 

On Monday, I had a client that sat all the way through job services orientation, and waited 45 minutes to talk to me afterwards, just to ask if we would pay her car insurance and provide gas vouchers.  When I said that our agency did not provide that assistance, and furthermore, no agency in Denver provided those services, she came unglued.  Some case workers might attempt to pass this client off to another organization or a church, but that is only wasting the client's time and remaining resources.  It is far more compassionate to  be honest.  This woman was furious with me, and said that because I could not help her, she was going to become homeless.  Which is entirely not true, but it doesn't always feel so great. 

I have to remember that there are many, many clients every day that I can help.  My inability to provide a service in the moment is not going to make someone homeless (they played a role in that themselves a long time ago), and I am called to do the most good for the most people.  Pragmatism is a pretty important skill to have in this field.  Fortunately, after my difficult conversation with that client on Monday, I had a wonderful client that needed  a variety of services that I could actually provide and he was grateful.  And that is the way that things usually go.  The good and the bad, all mixed together.