Editor’s Note: Cyneatha Millsaps, executive director of Mennonite Women USA, gave Mennonite Mission Network permission to repost her blog. It first appeared on the Mennonite Women USA website on April 21, 2021.
I can’t celebrate. I can’t find peace in Derek Chauvin’s guilty verdict because I am never happy to see anyone go to prison. Prison is a horrible place. Yes, Chauvin must pay for his horrific crime, but his conviction only reminds me of the men and women — especially those I know — tortured in our prison system.
Chauvin is about to face great hardship. Prisons in the United States are not designed to rehabilitate but to punish, and they offer only a handful of outcomes. It might well be that, for his own safety, Chauvin will need to remain in coffin-like isolation for years. Or guards will turn their backs as other inmates inhumanely punish him. Or a hate group will suck him in, never allowing him to deal with the pain he caused. Or Chauvin will commit suicide. How is this something to celebrate?
These grim consequences of imprisonment have been Black people’s reality for centuries, yet most of us refuse to see our nation’s prison system for the dangerous and evil establishment that it is. There is no justice in America’s prisons — only punishment, revenge, and death.
The system that funneled George Floyd into a life of poverty and drug use is the same one that shaped Chauvin into an authority abusing his power — killing another human being — while fellow officers stood by. Why do we evade responsibility for this calamity? It is our system too.
Punishing Chauvin is not the only answer to the loss of Floyd’s life. While it’s easy for us to point the finger at him and cathartic to watch his conviction, we can never forget that there are thousands of Chauvins patrolling our streets every day. There are myriad Floyds about to suffer and die by their hands. Until we address the issues that collided on May 23, 2020, we will never truly achieve a more just justice system.
Floyd’s death opened our eyes to the racial injustices in our country; our penal system’s violence and inhumanity should do the same. Many of the recent cases in the limelight have involved Black and Latino men logically fleeing and resisting arrest. They know that law enforcement could destroy their lives in an instant, without a fair trial. Floyd and Daunte Wright were rightly afraid.
I wish I did not care what happens to Chauvin in prison, but I do. I wish I could say he deserves what’s coming to him, but I can’t. Chauvin and his family will never know what Floyd experienced before and during his arrest, but they are about to get an up-close and personal look at why people of color fear imprisonment. We who uphold the penal system must not close our eyes. We have a moral obligation to consider Chauvin and his family and the pain they endure.
I’ve experienced trauma with the penal system that makes me lament anyone being sent to prison. Whenever I learn of a crime, my heart and mind shift to the perpetrator because I know that our punitive response will harm or even destroy that person. We are no better than the criminal when we feed our need to punish. Why don’t we focus on enabling Chauvin to recognize that he made a big mistake, confess, and demonstrate that he is truly sorry? Our system doesn’t allow for this. Instead, accused individuals must minimize what they have done to protect themselves from laws, policies, and practices focused on harmful retribution.
We must transform our way of dealing with crime to shift our focus from retribution to redemptive and restorative justice. I pray for the day when I’ll be able to celebrate a guilty verdict because of good reason to believe it will lead to shalom.
