“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
— Maya Angelou
The U.S. criminal legal system does not know what accountability is. To say it’s designed to hold people accountable is to perpetuate one of the great lies of America. Its bedfellows include (but are not limited to): this country was not built upon the genocide of indigenous peoples; chattel slavery was not a systematic genocidal act; slavery has been abolished in the U.S.; policing and prisons were designed to keep the collective “us” safe; racism and sexism aren’t embedded in every system and institution of this nation.
I want to open this year with truth, starting with the fundamental difference between accountability and punishment.
Punishment is a passive process. The only thing the punished person must do is endure the consequences of their behavior; no other action is required, and positive change is often prevented rather than facilitated.
Accountability is an active process. When a person has caused harm, they take responsibility for that harm and seek to repair it as much as possible, according to the needs of the person they harmed. This reparative action strongly facilitates positive changes in the person who caused the harm and in their relationship to the person harmed. It also facilitates healing and supports feelings of safety for the harmed person.
Our current criminal legal system inflicts punishment and prevents accountability. When I first committed the horrible act that brought me to prison, I did not understand why I did what I did. I went from being a friendly, loving, kind person to nearly killing two people. It made absolutely no sense to me. I carried no ill will against them, they had done nothing to harm me. I was the threat to them, yet I experienced them as a threat. The logic didn’t hold. I didn’t yet know about childhood trauma or its lasting impact, so there was no way for me to make meaning of what I had done. I wanted to die.
I owed the people I harmed the truth of what I did. Yes, I held to the “deny, deny, deny” method that Law & Order teaches you when first facing police contact. Then the police came back and asked me what really happened. I knew I was guilty, and I knew my foster brother didn’t do what I did. I knew I needed to own my actions, so I agreed to do a walk-through of the crime scene. I told the police everything I did, and when they asked me why, I tried to use logic. This was later used against me in court to paint me as a vicious monster. They didn’t know that I, then still a teenager, was applying TV-show logic to real life violence I didn’t understand. I’d thought through old episodes of CSI and Law & Order to try to make sense of why someone in my position would engage in such violence. The only thing that made sense was the elimination of witnesses.
Not until five years later, after learning how to lie and manipulate the system, would I come back to a place of truth. When I met my first lawyer, he told me to stop talking to anyone but him. My case was so high profile and political that this man would not allow me to have my own discovery material. I learned from other incarcerated people that I had a right to see it, and only then did he photocopy all the gruesome details of what I had done and hand them to me – all 900+ pages, printed on green paper so nobody could hide them if they stole them from me.
Those pages showed me the evidence the State had against me. The State wanted to take my life. My original charges carried four life sentences, plus 70 years. I then learned that my job as a Defendant was to defend myself against the State. My job was to help my lawyer tell the best story he could in order to give me a chance at having a life after prison. I learned how to craft a story around the evidence against me, instead of simply telling the truth — no matter how damning that truth was for me.
The criminal legal system is not set up for accountability, but restorative justice is.
Restorative justice reminds us that we are interconnected, that harm also damages community. It calls me to take responsibility for what I did, to ask what I can do to make things as right as possible, and then it supports me in working to repair that harm. Part of being human means we are going to cause more harm than we can possibly repair. Restorative justice unearths the why of what we do, exposing the unmet need that drove us to cause harm, then calls us to repair that harm and invites the community to step in and repair that which is beyond our capacity to fix.
I humbly implore you to accept the responsibility to dispel the false narrative of this system. When you know better, you have to do better. Speaking truth to power from a place of love will help us take a step forward toward a more healed and accountable future.
Leo Hylton is a PhD student at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, currently incarcerated at Maine State Prison. His education and work are focused on Social Justice Advocacy and Activism, with a vision toward an abolitionist future. You can reach him at: Leo Hylton #70199, 807 Cushing Rd., Warren, ME 04864, or leoshininglight@gmail.com.
