The Paw Print

A news publication created by Baruch's College Now high school journalism class

Archives for August 2019

The unjust justice system

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The problem with the justice system is that its name is inaccurate. For centuries, many innocent individuals have been locked behind the bars of prison cells for crimes they didn’t commit. American prosecutors are so fixated on solving crimes and keeping the streets safe that it is no longer relevant if those who serve time are actually guilty. Prosecutors must be held accountable. 

Recently, Netflix released a four-episode series by Ava DuVernay, When They See Us. It shares the stories of the men known as the “Central Park Five” and surrounds an event that took place in April 1989. A white female jogger, Trisha Meili, was raped in Central Park and five teenagers—Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise—were arrested and convicted for the attack.

The five boys, who are black or Hispanic, pled not guilty. At the time, they were between the ages of 14 and 16 and there was no evidence linking them to the case. The American justice system cost each of them 7 to 12 years in prison. 

For more than a decade, the nation felt comfortable with these boys being punished. One of the boys, Korey Wise, was tried as an adult at the age of 16 and spent 12 years in various prisons, including time in solitary confinement at Rikers Island. In 2002, the man who raped Meili, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime. The five men were exonerated.

“The system broke a lot of things that can’t be fixed,” Antron McCray, 45, said in an interview with Oprah on Netflix.

The stories of these men are not isolated or unique. According to Prison Fellowship, “Since 1989, the United States has used DNA testing to exonerate 225 innocent people after they have spent years in captivity,” which is likely only a fraction of those wrongfully convicted.

Many prosecutors in the nation focus their attention on increasing their conviction rates to create a successful image for themselves, which often leads to wrongful convictions. 

According to the Innocence Project, in April 1999, Stanley Mozee and Dennis Allen, who are both people of color, were found guilty of the murder of Reverend Jesse Borns Jr., and were sentenced to life in prison. Eventually, the case was re-investigated and “ultimately turned up substantial additional evidence proving the two men’s innocence. Much of that evidence was in the trial prosecutor’s own files, but was hidden from the defense until the district attorney’s office adopted an ‘open file’ policy years after Mozee and Allen’s trials,” the Innocence Project says. 

There was no evidence linking either man to the case. The American justice system cost each of them 15 years in prison. 

Despite policies dictating that prosecutors must reveal evidence that could help defendants, many prosecutors fail to do so, often due to racial bias or blind ambition. As a result, innocent people have their lives stolen from them while the real culprits remain free.

We live in a nation where innocent people are locked away while the guilty walk free. We live in a nation where prosecutorial misconduct takes place constantly and is ignored. We live in a nation where our biased justice system fails the people.

While it may never be fixed, it can slowly be mended. State bar organizations throughout the nation are responsible for investigating claims of wrongful conviction and disciplining prosecutors who commit misconduct. However, most misconduct is ignored.

According to Jeff Adachi and Peter Calloway from The Appeal, “One study found that in California, from 1997 to 2009, there were 707 instances where a judge found that a prosecutor committed misconduct. Only six of those—less than 1 percent—resulted in a public sanction by the state bar.” Misconduct claims must be taken seriously and investigated. The state bar organizations in the U.S. must do their job.

Lives are at stake.

Homelessness can not be ignored

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It’s summer time right now and everyone is going to the park, the beach, or out of state. When I go to the park to eat during my break, I see many homeless people sitting on the benches. When I go home on the train I see them begging for some change so they can eat or feed their children.

The number of homeless people in NYC has been gradually increasing, and not many shelters can house them, because they are full of people. To solve this, the city should create more shelters. 

According to the organization Coalition for the Homeless, homelessness in NYC has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In May 2019, there were 61,129 homeless people, including 14,674 homeless families with 21,372 homeless children sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. Many people become homeless due to evictions, job loss, domestic violence, or overcrowded housing. Homeless shelters are overcrowded and full of people, the majority of them families. 

Even though there are homeless shelters, thousands of homeless people sleep on NYC streets, in the subway system and in other public places. African-American and Latino New Yorkers make up the majority of homeless people. There have to be enough shelters for everyone to live in because the people who cannot stay in shelters that are overloaded are living on the streets. 

The problem is that some of the homeless, may have run away from their house because they don’t want to live with their parents or their parents kicked them out. 

Most of the homeless people have mental health problems and they need to get help, but there is no one to help them because they live in the streets and no one pays attention to them. Many homeless people don’t know how to deal with their problems and turn to alcohol and drugs, and become addicted to it. 

I personally do not know anyone who has been homeless, but my mom has heard that a family friend is living on the streets because he has alcohol problems. The family is trying to look for him so they could help him, but can’t find him. It broke my mom’s heart hearing about this and that night she prayed, hoping the man was safe wherever he was.

The number of shelters needs to increase. According to a 2015 assessment by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in the United States. At a minimum,140,000 or 25 percent of these people were seriously mentally ill, and 250,000 or 45 percent had any mental illness. There should be medical employees who can examine the people and get them the treatment that they need. Homelessness is not something that can be ignored-not when you see many of these people on every corner.

 

Review: Lunar Chronicles excels at representing women

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“Her whole body was wound up tight. She was ready to storm the palace herself – an army of one.”

The thrilling conclusion to the series The Lunar Chronicles, by Marissa Meyer wins hands down as one of the best sci-fi fantasy novels of 2015 that has just about everything you could hope for in a book. Action, romance, suspense, a diverse set of characters, a chilling villian, and more.

Picking up from the last installment Cress, the characters Cinder, Cress, Scarlet, Wolf, Thorne, Iko, and Kai, are aboard the Rampion a space pod ship. They are getting ready to hatch a new plan in order to take down the ruthless Queen Levana of Luna once and for all, so Cinder can rightfully claim her throne. Throughout the novel Cinder also receives help from Winter, a princess of Luna (a moon colony), and Jacin, a royal guard.

In Winter, the readers are introduced to the characters, Winter and Jacin, hence the title. Winter is a character undergoing a disease called “Lunar Sickness” where she experiences hallucinations, as her mental state is deteriorating. 

“…the walls have been bleeding for years, and no one else sees it.” 

Very rarely in the Young Adult Novel world are characters written with this dynamic. 

Including a character who is at the mercy of a disease, with no cure, adds a touch of realism to the book. Including a character who isn’t doing well mentally, adds representation to a large group of people, something that was needed in 2015 and still needed in 2019.

The representation doesn’t stop there. Winter is a manifestation of the tale Snow White, but instead of Winter being caucasian she is described with skin as “black as ebony wood”, and the characters Cinder and Kai, are both from China. 

What has made this series unique is its a series based off of classic fairytales, but the women are strong,  “I was always much more drawn to those strong, empowered female characters — both as a reader and as a writer,” Meyer said in an interview in the Bustle. 

Winter is the final installment in the series, where Cinder, who ever since book one, has been set with the ambition of taking down the queen, and throughout the series we see her grow with new friends along the way. The dynamic between the women in the series is what makes this book so refreshing in the Young Adult genre. These women have stuck together, and do not immediately hate each other, which is what makes them realistic portrayals of women, and therefore this series accurately establishes women empowerment. 

“When they arrived, they arrived in force- a dozen military ships surrounding the safe house, guns drawn.”

Not only does Meyer portray women relationships in an accurate manner, but she also makes them strong. Meyer makes her characters have the will to use weapons and fight, to overthrow a queen. It’s important that women read about characters who are strong, that way they believe they too can fight, and no longer be silenced. 

Even though there were many characters in the novel, 830 pages were enough to pace the story properly, which shows how well done the writing is. Each character was given a solid amount of time, for the reader to get to know, and be able to enhance the plot, leading up to the big showdown between Cinder and the queen.

Opinion: In order to solve climate change, we need to take on wealthy corporations

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It’s the middle of summer, and the temperature has been reaching almost 100 degrees. But as carbon emissions continue to rise, the planet is only going to keep getting hotter. With many attempts to prevent climate disaster being blocked or repealed, it seems what needs to be changed is not just how we treat individual corporations, but the way the economy and the system as a whole function.

 

A New York Times analysis of the policy changes under the current Trump Administration reveals that 83 different regulations have been rolled back or are in the process of being rolled back, with 22 of them being related to air pollution. This is during a time when levels of carbon dioxide in the air are at “unprecedented levels” according to a study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. According to Erika Spanger-Siegfried, a lead climate analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, temperatures by 2050 could reach levels that “[make] it difficult for human bodies to cool themselves and could be deadly.”

 

To pin this problem solely on the Trump administration, however, would be false. An article by researchers from both the U.S. and China published in Nature reveals that more than half of future carbon emissions are expected to come from China, the U.S, and the European Union, the three highest predicted sources of emissions. Although China is the highest by a large margin, expected to emit 41% of the carbon, the US and EU are expected to make up 9% and 7% respectively, which is still a large amount. Climate change is a global problem, but the ones responsible are a few wealthy industrial nations.

 

Yet despite some of the wealthiest countries being the main causes of climate change, the ones that are being hit hardest by it are those that are less fortunate. According to a study by researchers at Stanford University in California, the wealth gap between the richest and poorest countries is 25% higher than it would be without climate change. Not only are the choices that the U.S, Europe, and China are making going to cause disaster for their citizens in a few decades, those choices are also disastrous for the most vulnerable countries right now.

 

So why is climate change still an issue? Why do we have a government that is reversing policies that would prevent climate change? The answer to these questions, it seems, is money. Think Tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which spends a large number of its resources on promoting climate change denial, receive funding from a variety of wealthy corporations.

 

The CEI is funded not only by the Charles Koch Institute and the American Fuel and Petrochemicals Manufacturers, which are known for lobbying against the regulation of fossil fuels, but also by larger companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, according to the New York Times. This is because the CEI, as an Amazon spokeswoman said, “will help advance policy objectives aligned with [Amazon’s] interests.”

 

The reason these corporations fund the same organizations as fossil fuel lobbyists is that despite how much Amazon or Google may claim to oppose the fossil fuel industry, they both have the same top priority: promoting a pro-corporation, anti-regulation agenda. In the case of the CEI, their beliefs, aside from man-made climate change not being an issue, include opposing a $15 minimum wage and wanting to repeal antitrust laws, both of which are in the interests of large companies that probably would become trusts if they were legally allowed to. They may sign a declaration in support of global climate agreements, but they will still be naturally allied with the AFPM, as will nearly every for-profit corporation.

 

The fossil fuel companies themselves also have far too much influence. In Oklahoma, a state agency funded mainly by oil companies creates classroom materials and teacher training, according to the Washington Post. The goal of these classroom materials is, to downplay climate change and promote the usage of oil.

 

We cannot trust corporations to solve climate change for us. A permanent end to rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels requires a permanent end to, or at least a drastic reduction of, the fossil fuel industry and our usage of fossil fuels. If we are acknowledging and tackling the threat that the fossil fuel industry poses, then we also need to acknowledge that in this struggle, corporations are an obstacle.

 

A system that promotes corporate interests and enables companies to be as powerful as Microsoft or Google, and that enables oil companies to have power even in our classrooms is not a system that will let us solve climate change. It is a system that promotes and perpetuates climate change, causing the summers to get hotter, the poorer countries to get poorer, and the time we have left before our planet becomes unlivable shorter.

The Rise of Lo-Fi Hip-Hop

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Degraded audio signals, tape hisses, misplayed notes, and environmental interference are the key elements of lo-fi hip-hop, a chillwave music genre — and people are loving it.

Lo-fi hip-hop consists of phonographic imperfections that create a chill atmosphere that brings nostalgia you may have never felt before. It’s perfect to listen to while doing your daily tasks such as homework or even if you want to go to sleep. I for one find myself being more productive while listening lo-fi hip-hop, even though it gives lazy vibes. The irony of this music-genre is why I grew so interested in it. 

I first discovered this music genre while surfing the web on my living room couch in August heat and found myself at a YouTube channel that streams lo-fi hip-hop. “AnimeVibe” was the name of the YouTube channel, and I was in complete awe while listening to the songs they play. AnimeVibe first started its channel on October 31, 2014 and has been collaborating with aspiring artists since then. While listening to these songs, I couldn’t help but feel nostalgic for rainy days with a mellow atmosphere while looking outside my window. 

The first song I heard on their AnimeVibe playlist was “rearview” by samsa. After listening to his songs, I couldn’t help but look for more songs by samsa. I became more and more interested in this type of music. And thus, I discovered lo-fi hip-hop. And it seems to be that more people are discovering lo-fi hip-hop as well. 

While this music naturally has a slow, mellow, and low-fidelity quality, it is surprisingly and subtly making its way into mainstream music. Late south Florida rapper XXXTentacion debuted with a mellow, solemn, and low quality soundtrack while rapping. Unlike the typical kind of rapper, X was following a different kind of path, changing the stereotypes of rappers in today’s society — and people loved it. When X released his debut album “17,” with track “Jocelyn Flores,” he showed affinity for lo-fi production, and people grew interested in what they were hearing. 

While lo-fi hip-hop can also be giddy and blissful, X does not portray that as his song, “Jocelyn Flores,” was about a friend of his who took her life, which makes the song very solemn and depressing. Later on in his music career, he creates more upbeat rowdy music while experimenting with the nature of lo-fi hip-hop.  

“Now you’ll find chillhop/chillwave/chillout mixes on almost every music streaming service… This could help explain why lo-fi music has seen a modern day resurgence,” says John Greenfield, who frequently writes about internet and pop culture in his article, “[Music Discovery] An Exploration of the Lo-Fi Aesthetic.” It’s clear lo-fi hip-hop has become such a phenomenon — especially on YouTube since that is where the lo-fi hip-hop community is mainly based. 

I’m glad to see lo-fi hip-hop is helping artists accomplish their goal of hitting the charts on music streaming platforms such as Spotify. The number of listeners of Spotify’s playlist “Lo-fi Beats” has risen tremendously and continues to be an inspiration for aspiring artists. 

Whenever you have the time, check out Spotify’s playlist, “Lo-fi Beats” or any YouTube channel that live streams lo-fi hip-hop such as “ChilledCow” or “Bootleg Boy,” especially when you have work to do.

Surely, you’ll find an artist with a lo-fi hip-hop to add to your playlist.

WNYC’s Brigid Bergin

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Brigid Bergin went from working in a bank, to being part of the political beat at WNYC. 

She confessed to Baruch College Now students at a spacious conference room in the offices of NYC Public Radio yesterday with the goal of helping aspiring journalists. When the last question came up, everyone listened carefully to Bergin’s response about her professional career. 

“I didn’t know I really wanted to be a journalist,” is something the high school students didn’t expect to hear from the WNYC City Hall and politician reporter. 

Bergin worked 8 and a half years in a bank and described her work space there as “a little cubical.” She wanted to go out and explore what was happening around her neighborhood and her city. She realized that journalism would fulfill her desires of being involved in various communities. 

She went to journalism school and that’s when she transitioned from her work at the bank to being a full-time journalist. 

“I fell in love with radio and WNYC,” she says when talking about being an intern at the NYC Public Radio. 

 She began as a general assignment journalist for a year, like many others. Later on, she was assigned to specific topics. 

If she wasn’t in the politics area, she would lean towards the cultural aspect of finding different communities around each borough.

Killing Creativity

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“He who marches out of step hears his own drum.” 

-Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey and his merry band of Pranksters boarded a bus called Further in 1964 to spread their message of nonconformity, preaching individuality and creativity. Drugs ruined this message, so it was not able to break through to mainstream society. That does not mean that what Kesey was saying was bad, it just got lost in translation. 

It is our job to finish what Kesey started and make sure this message breaks through. We need to save individuality to progress as a society. Schools are partly responsible for the conformist society we live in today.

Conformity can be as mundane as lining up for lunch, sitting in rows, and being told when to talk and when to stay quiet or it can be as grand as grading every student on the same rubric. 

A rubric’s main job is to assess students and their work by giving a clear set of criteria for them to follow. This sounds good in theory, but nowadays, schools have rubrics for everything: group work, peer discussion, Socratic seminars, papers, essays, projects, and participation. Thus, rubrics in all of their glorious uses are partly responsible for society holding blind conformity as gospel by grading every aspect of life inside the classroom and only rewarding perfection or anything close to it. That’s not to say that we should just throw away every rubric. It is important to set some standards but schools have taken it too far.

Firstly, rubrics raise the issue of whether or not kids sitting in AP and honors classes are actually smart or if they are good at memorizing criteria. There is a difference between students who can memorize standards and students who are smart and creative. Innovation cannot be measured with a checklist, so it is rarely rewarded in our school system. To do well in school, you have to conform.

Secondly, these rubrics are extended to teacher performance so much so that lecture classes are frowned upon. I understand the school’s desire for us as a student body to collaborate, but this does not allow teachers to do their jobs: teach. According to etale.org, “[Rubrics] risk turning the role of the teacher into that of a grader, leaving less room for the teacher to be an authentic ‘reader’ of student work.” This is perpetuating a reward system that values teamwork and meeting requirements more than understanding the content and deep thought, thus creating busy work that does not allow students to form their own opinions.  

Furthermore, rubrics teach students the value of perfection which is unrealistic in the real world. Matt Suarez from Penn State commented on this saying that a student who gets two questions wrong on a 10 question quiz would receive a C; which for a lot of students is not ideal. “Nobody is perfect, so to expect that from people who are going through potentially the most stressful times of their lives is not the best way to go,” Suarez says. Rubrics put young people on a scale that punishes imperfection which is ridiculous. 

Finally, rubrics discourage creativity. According to Conformity and Learning from BBN Times, “Conformity – by its very nature – relies on reapplying solutions from the past, but with more careful control and greater intensity. What we really need is the unleashing of the creative genius that makes us human. Not the direction we have been taking as we have succeeded in quashing it, almost to extinction.” Society can not move towards innovation without creativity. Rubrics are flawed because they look for a cookie cutter work and that’s what they reward.

It does not make sense for schools to accustom young minds to follow a checklist. That is not say that structure is bad, it is to say that you can not find innovation in the walls of a rubric. Grading students this way sets them up to be followers, not leaders or innovators. 

Not everyone will be the next big tech genius or artist but everyone should have the opportunity to step out of march to hear how their drum beats.

Do you hear your own drum?

This is a test

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This image requires alt text, but the alt text is currently blank. Either add alt text or mark the image as decorative. Matt Gonzales, Director, The School Diversity Project, New York Appleseed speaking at an event titled, The Harm of Segregation: Why where we live and learn matters. The October 23rd evening event took place at St. Ann & Holy Trinity Church located on Montague Street in Brooklyn.

“The curriculum taught me that white people captured me and took away my freedom. Why would I want to learn this?”

That goes through the minds of many black students as they sit in social studies class, says Jamaal Bowman, principal of Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in Co-op City.

Cornerstone takes a different approach. While many schools begin their study of black history with American slavery, Cornerstone reaches back to Ancient Egypt’s African roots. His students, Bowman told a town hall on education in the Bronx last month, learn that they “are descendants of kings and queens, not descendants of slaves. That’s a big difference.”

Parents, students and educators at the town hall are part of a larger conversation about how to make schools welcoming and relevant for all children—not just the white, middle-class ones. Equalizing resources and even integrating schools is not enough, says Matt Gonzales, NY Appleseed’s Diversity Project director. We, also, he says, “have to do deep work so all kids who enter the classroom are uplifted.”

Nelson Luna of the Bronx, now a first-year student at Columbia University, agrees that’s not currently the case. “When you don’t see yourself, you don’t feel connected and you don’t feel passionate. You feel out of place,” says Luna, a co-founder of Teens Take Charge, which organizes students to speak out about integration and other issues.