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Although her killer was caught and convicted, I grew up watching the brief beauty of my sister’s life eclipsed by a political narrative that weaponized her innocence to propel an era of mass incarceration and true crime obsession.

Those early experiences showed me how sensationalist stories in the media about high-profile crimes not only erode the dignity of victims but also can inflate public perception of national crime rates, which have been in decline for decades. Misguided policies like three-strikes laws aren’t merely unfortunate side effects of inflammatory discourse; they are the direct result of moral outrage curated by hyperbolic headlines and the pervasiveness of true crime’s grisly method of storytelling."

Vincent Schiraldi

SCHIRALDI: We had a simultaneous, very substantial reduction in the number of kids who are locked up, 70% from 2000 to 2020. And we had about an 80-plus percent decline in arrests of juveniles during that period of time. So it was kind of a virtuous cycle - fewer kids getting arrested, fewer kids getting locked up and learning. Then we had this pandemic. Kids were disrupted from schools. Parents were losing their jobs. Mental health issues were sort of increasing for both the young people and their families and their neighborhoods. People started to arm themselves in those neighborhoods, mostly adults but sometimes kids. And when you have a lot of people with a lot of frustration, with a lot of guns in their pockets, you stop having fistfights, and you start having shootouts.

"Parents often have a lot of wisdom, as they know a lot about anxiety and depression and they know a lot about how to cope with anxiety and depression," he said. "And this may be the most psychologically aware and articulate group of teenagers in our history who have a very wide vocabulary for talking about mental health challenges. And in general, teens don't feel the same stigma that their parents do, so there are many cases where teens can also be helpful to their parents."

“The way the United States approaches prison tourism re-inscribes the kind of politics that support mass incarceration,” said Jill McCorkel, a professor of criminology at Villanova University. “It turns human suffering into a spectacle.” 

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Robert S., an incarcerated man at SCI Chester, said he doesn’t have a problem with prison museums, but organizers should make sure that people have an understanding of the effect on the people who were housed there. “The museum is for amusement, but this was someone's pain,” he said. “This was someone's struggle. This was someone's life. It wasn't amusement to them.”

the bill will "place the burden on the courts to prove that families are able to pay the fees. It also removes the obligation to pay for a public defender. The new law additionally applies to some services for youth in the custody of the state’s Department of Child Services."