I had a mission as I hopped on the subway stop at City Hall. It was Monday and instead of assisting with arraignments in court, I had been reassigned to find and copy court files from the Bronx Criminal Court on 161st Street. With directions to the building scrawled on a tiny piece of legal paper, I tried to decode the indecipherable jumbles of words that would take me to my destination. Sometimes on Mondays you've got to entertain yourself by assuming that a small task you're assigned is really an important mission. Such is the delicate balance of interning.
Yet the Bronx this morning would prove to be an unexpected surprise. My initial impression of the courthouse was that everyone spoke Spanish, except for the lawyers. It also appears that a large part of the courtroom's clientele is African American. What could this possibly mean? I've heard stories about people I know growing up in the Bronx. Didn't Robert DeNiro make a movie about white people in the Bronx? Am I in the wrong Bronx? I look up at the large number of people, mostly young, male, and about my age.
Why was a black man here instead of me? Why was an educated middle class female less likely to have a criminal record than a Hispanic lower class male? Why do I keep seeing the same people being arrested, being arraigned and serving time? What is it about the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens that breeds this racial segregation in the criminal justice system?
I ended the morning by getting the files I needed and exiting through the front door. As I walked down the steps of the massive stairs outside the court building, I noted the barrier forming between me and the people who still remained within.
