Voices Don’t Need Giving – They Need Hearing
Emma Bruns
I chose Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With (My Modern Met, 2022) to guide my reflections because it has always stuck with me. How can a small girl say so much without saying anything at all? When I first saw this painting, I thought about who gets heard in society and who does not, even when they are speaking loud and clear.
The painting shows Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old Black girl, walking to an all-white school under armed guard with racial slurs written on the wall behind her. Though silent, her presence is deafening. It reminds me that having a voice does not mean being heard.
“Give people a voice.” I have heard this phrase in NGO campaigns, political speeches, and prison reform panels observed for class. It is likely well-meaning but paradoxical. Everyone has a voice. We are born with it. So how can it be given to us?
Art experts, historians, and viewers often describe Rockwell’s 1964 painting as “giving a voice” to the Civil Rights Movement (My Modern Met, 2022). But Ruby Bridges did not need a voice handed to her; she was the voice. Her silent walk through screams and insults said more than any politician’s speech ever could. The problem was not the absence of a voice but society’s refusal to listen.
I see the same dynamic in the context of prisons. In the US, where mass incarceration still disproportionately affects Black and Brown communities, the phrase “giving people a voice” is used as a rhetorical band-aid. Take the US Department of Justice’s “Second Chance Month” initiative, which claims to “give a voice” to formerly incarcerated individuals (US Department of Justice, 2023). Again, the intent might be sincere, but these individuals already have a voice. What they lack is access, amplification, and audibility in a prison system built to mute them.
I ask myself: why do some voices carry farther than others? Why do voices of war criminals and strategists, who drone-strike civilians from afar, rarely reach courtrooms, while those of often involuntary drug users echo off prison walls?
Prison is a space where voices are deliberately drowned out. Those inside may speak, but the outside rarely listens. The silencing begins long before the doors shut: through poverty, underfunded schools, and racial profiling. It begins with the assumption that some voices are more “rational,” “credible,” or “deserving” than others. It is the architecture of what Alexander calls The New Jim Crow (2012).
To me, saying “give people a voice” mistakes muting for absence. It ignores the volume at which people already speak and the systems tuned to different frequencies. Prison is not just physical confinement but an acoustic gatekeeper deciding who gets heard.
This might sound obvious, but what if, instead of giving voices that are not ours to give, we built systems that listened? Systems that recognised the speech already happening in prison poetry (Darwish, n.d.; Kaufman, n.d.), courtroom testimonies, and within the silence of resistance. What if we stopped assuming marginalised people are voiceless and asked why we are deaf to them?
Ruby Bridges did not ask for a voice she already had. She walked. The problem we all live with is not that some people do not speak – it is that society decides who gets heard.
References
Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (Revised ed.). The New Press.
Darwish, M. (n.d.). To my mother. Palestine Advocacy Project. https://www.palestineadvocacyproject.org/poetry-campaign/to-my-mother/
Kaufman, B. (n.d.). Jail Poems. Poetry Foundation.
U.S. Department of Justice. (2023, April 28). Justice Department releases strategic plan supporting goals of Federal Interagency Alternatives to Incarceration Initiative. https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-releases-strategic-plan supporting-goals-federal-interagency-alternatives
Photo Reference
Image:
My Modern Met. (2022, August 30). Norman Rockwell’s ‘The Problem We All Live With,’ a Groundbreaking Civil Rights Painting. https://mymodernmet.com/norman-rockwell the-problem-we-all-live-with/
Outside Looking Nowhere: Confronting My Privilege of Ignorance
Emma Bruns
I have chosen two images to guide my reflections. The first shows me living a joyful and safe life. While not entirely shielded or carefree, it emanates the privilege of safety, education, and family. The second picture depicts women in Vechta prison manufacturing bags for Canvasco. I have bought this brand before, aware of its prison collaboration, yet never paused to explore what it truly entailed.
To me, these images encapsulate the stark dichotomy between the pervasive presence of prisons and their invisibility to those privileged enough to avoid interaction with the carceral system. I was outside looking nowhere, though everything was visible. Leaning on these images, I step toward confronting my privileged ignorance.
I never had to think about prisons. Yet, they are everywhere. So how did that happen? Growing up in a peaceful, affluent European society with Swiss, German and American citizenship, I was never forced to consider what it means to be confined, surveilled, or stripped of agency. My interactions with the justice system were limited to university discussions in St. Gallen and Amsterdam, viewing prisons through law and order. If prisons entered my consciousness at all, they were distant institutions from the news or movies. Looking back, I must have felt for those confined or horror at inhumane conditions. Still, prisons were places where other people went. People who, unlike me, lacked the privilege to avoid them.
I am embarrassed by this ignorance, but embarrassment helps no one. Learning about prisons and encouraging others to do the same feels like a step forward. It has forced me to acknowledge my place in a deeply unequal system, where the privilege of rarely thinking about incarceration reflects structural injustice. My ability to move freely, speak without fear, and exist without supervision is not universal, though it should be. These privileges are often granted along race, nationality, and class.
The more I read about prisons, the clearer it becomes that they do not exist in a vacuum. They manifest inequality, removing those deemed guilty or unworthy and placing them under total control. No one argues that serious crimes causing harm should go unaddressed. There must be a response. However, reducing a person to bare life, as Agamben describes, strips them of rights and places them outside legal protection, creating a state of exception (Agamben, 1998, pp. 83-85). The rule of law is suspended, allowing the state to exercise power, control and punishment unchecked.
Foucault’s concept of biopower and biopolitics reveals that incarceration is about more than individual punishment; it is about managing populations (Lawlor & Nale, 2014, pp. 40-41). I now see how states, through policing and imprisonment, dictate whose lives are protected.
Why does it matter that people like me learn about this?
If prisons are a tool of exclusion, the greatest privilege is never interacting with them, never knowing anyone inside, fearing arrest, or considering what happens there. This ignorance is not neutral; it is part of the system. I could live without thinking about prisons because others could not. Because others were imprisoned. People born into safety and privilege, like me, must confront this reality. It seems an obvious conclusion, yet only now, at 25, I am engaging with it: prisons are not separate from me but deeply connected to the structures that ensure my comfort.
I cannot change where I was born or my inherited privileges, but I can change how I engage with them. I can acknowledge that under different circumstances, the systems protecting me might have confined me instead. I am trying to let that realisation lead not to guilt but action.
References
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press.
Lawlor, L., & Nale, J. (Eds.). (2014). Biopolitics. In The Cambridge Foucault lexicon (pp. 37 43). Cambridge University Press.
Photo References
Image I:
Personal Collection. (2025).
Image II:
Canvasco. (n.d.). Manufacturing. Canvasco. https://canvasco.de/pages/manufacturing
The Role of Police in Academic Settings: Are “School Resource” Officers Successful in Mentoring Youth?
Jenifer Maria Solorzano
I had always been taught the police did not operate under a framework of protection in my neighbourhood. I trusted these lessons emphatically. However, I was in my first year of high school when it felt like a series of dominoes falling that forced me to not simply believe, but to bear witness – repeatedly – to the lack of care produced by the police system.
The four walls of my school held between them secrets of unnecessary force, brutality, and racialised profiling. Today, I find myself scouring the internet for news articles to remind myself that I have not imagined the ways we were treated by police. Yet, I am falling short. This documentation never existed, not because my mind has conjured up false memories, but because no one has the desire to listen to our truth. Our stories vanished upon our graduation dates.
No matter the lack of archival evidence, my high school experience served to dismantle the already crumbling foundation of which my relationship with the police had been built. One of the most prominent memories happened following the announcement of a mistrial in the case of Freddie Gray.
As I walked to school the following morning, I found myself weaving between the National Guard’s armoured vehicles as military officers, wearing an arsenal of weaponry, lined the pavement. We opened our bags as they thoroughly searched for any sign that we, children, may resort to violence following the verdict. We sat in classrooms as they paroled our corridors. We ate lunch in a cafeteria that had men with loaded guns stationed at every exit. It felt as if they were daring us to protest.
“School resource” officers continuously fail students as a resource. Their purpose to strengthen community outreach efforts only serves to divide. There was not a moment in four years where I sought their guidance. For that, I turned to school counsellors and trusted teachers. The same counsellors and teachers who pleaded for non-violent response plans to students. The police who made themselves all too comfortable in my school, fell short in their role just as “school resource” officers across the States tended to do.
My mind is flooded with memories of “school resource” officers sprinting down hallways and wrestling kids to the ground. They instilled a fear that was intended to keep us from defying the system of authority they rigidly put into place.
As we openly engage in dialogue surrounding ideas of a world where there are no police systems at play in the connective web of society, the conversation must also centre its question on how police presence impacts a child’s ability to learn and even more, what it does to their social-emotional development. Children will never be able to dream bigger than their current environment if they are repeatedly sent into one that treats them like criminals.
For every day that I stepped foot into my school to learn and grow, I left dehumanised. I learned the police would never be my protectors within the four walls of my high school.