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Crime, punishment, grief, payback — and compassion? | The Education Report

Crime, punishment, grief, payback — and compassion? | The Education Report

Crime, punishment, grief, payback — and compassion?

By Katy Murphy
Thursday, November 4th, 2010 at 9:54 pm in community, crime

So often — in life, in politics, in causes, on blogs — we end up in us-versus-them mode, so sure of the other side’s wrongness (and/or evilness) that we dehumanize them, at least to some degree.

That’s what I found so interesting about this story by my colleagues Scott Johnson and Angela Woodall. When I read the headline about the aftermath of tomorrow’s sentencing of Johannes Mehserle — which yours truly will be covering — I expected another story about merchants boarding up their shops and other signs of fear.

But that’s not what this story was about.

It opens with the perspective of Oakland Parents Together program director Kwame Nitoto, who went to a (figurative) place, he later admitted, he didn’t want to go. Here’s an excerpt from the story: Read the rest of this entry »