On Justice Audio Slideshow (Transcript)

Sandra Kinzer: Madison, like any city, or anyplace on earth really, has problems. Injustice, inequality. We asked people what they thought was the biggest challenge that Madison faces.

Jason Glozier: the way that we incarcerate people

Brogan Tracy: finding some sort of medium between both political parties, in terms of everyone getting along

Flora Erothstein: There are so many homeless people and I’m like “dude why don’t you just give them the home?”

James Lintner: looking around, I see a lot of homeless people. I feel like that’s a pretty big issue.

SK: Another theme the people we talked to brought up was the scale of the problems, or even the way we think about them.

JG: For all of the progressivism and liberalism in madison, we’re very individualistic about the way we think about social justice. … it takes a lot to step out of our boundaries and our comfort zones.

SK: Jason says you end up with these different groups.

SK: So you’re saying like there’s all these different groups like fighting for different things but they’re like not communicating?

JG: they are communicating about the need to fight for similar things, but they’re still going back and fighting for their specific concern.

SK: These challenges that people face are intertwined: homelessness, disabilities, the criminal justice system, and people of color.

JG: People’s lives aren’t as specific as a single issue.

SK: Though our city has a long ways to go, people have an idea of what a just Madison would look like.

Brogan Tracy: a town that treats everyone fairly, hopefully where everyone gets along for the most part.

Lucas Grabowski: where everyone has equal opportunities and like everyone just gets along

SR: it’s gotta be something where we all are coming to the table and ready to shed our defensiveness and be like hey you’re right this policy that we enacted that we thought was like super progressive is actually hurting half of our population. so let’s look at that.

JG: I think, for me, a just Madison looks like a community where people feel like they’re valued, like they have the resources they need to be able to move throughout it,

Sue Robinson: I would love to see a place where we have so much less offensiveness among white progressives. and so much more appreciation about how far we have to go in order to start doing hard work of resolving these disparities and disparities range across fields,

Samantha Silverman: Do you think Madison is a fair and just city?

Earlie Wilson: Never. The police harass you, they treat homeless like dirt. Madison is, they don’t want no homeless here, but homeless people all over the world. Mayor Soglin had, it was people out here that he did not like. He took money out of his pocket and had the police to drive them to the bus station and put them on the bus and get them out of Madison and told em don’t never come back. It’s really Madison is a college town, it’s a college student town, but there was people here before the college students, before they built the college, so it’s everybody’s town now and the sooner they realize that the better off they gonna be.