I n October 2015, I attended a talk featuring Piper Kerman, author of the memoir “Orange Is The New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison,” which inspired the award-winning Netflix television show. Kerman devoted much of her time to talking about the importance of criminal justice reform, and the auditorium was full of people receptive to her message. At the time, thanks to the work of advocates like Kerman, there was bipartisan acknowledgment that the criminal justice system was unfair, ineffective and inefficient. It was one of President Obama’s key objectives and one of his few agendas that didn’t receive pushback from Republicans in Congress. As such, it seemed like criminal justice reform was inevitable. In Trump’s America, though, it seems unimaginable. It’s quite easy to see why the system needs to be reformed. The United States accounts for 4.4 percent of the world’s population but accounts for 22 percent of the world’s prison population. With 716 prisoners per 100,000 people, the United States has the highest prison population rate in the world. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this high rate of incarceration is due to high rates of crime. In fact, the International Crime Victims Survey shows that the United States has similar rates of criminal victimization as Western European countries. Furthermore, the United States’ staggeringly high rates of incarceration have disproportionately affected young Black men with low levels of education. As of 2008, one in 10 young African-American men with high school diplomas were in jail or prison. For Black male high school drop-outs, the incarceration rate was 37 percent. Given how difficult it is for ex-offenders to gain employment and the disenfranchisement of ex-felons in many states, these high incarceration rates can have lasting negative impacts on the African-American community. Thus, mass incarceration perpetuates cycles of economic and racial inequality. There are also very high fiscal costs to the criminal justice system. In the fiscal year of 2013 alone, the budget request for the Federal Bureau of Prisons was $6.9 billion and accounted for more than 25 percent of the Department of Justice’s budget. This is hardly surprising given the United States’ abysmal recidivism rates. One study found that within five years of release, about 76 percent of released prisoners were rearrested. Therefore, it’s hard to ignore that the U.S. criminal justice system has failed to reform the prisoners whom it incarcerates, allowed for unequal and unjust outcomes and, in the process, racked up a huge bill for U.S. taxpayers. Due to increasing awareness of these concerns, the pendulum of public opinion has swayed toward supporting criminal justice reform. This push for reform was clear in October 2015, when bipartisan legislation was proposed in the Senate to reduce the length of mandatory minimum sentences and ban solitary confinement for juveniles, among many other reforms. Unfortunately, and despite diverse and powerful support, the bill languished in the Senate. Though it was crafted by senators on both sides of party lines, Trump’s law-and-order campaign brought back the “tough-on- crime” rhetoric that altered the conversation and the political dynamics. This change in tone permitted (and likely motivated) several prominent Republicans to vocally oppose the once-popular bill. Ultimately, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell did not allow a vote on the proposal, deeming it too controversial and divisive. If the failure of Congress to pass a bipartisan bill addressing mass incarceration dealt a blow to the goal of criminal justice reform, Trump’s appointment for attorney general delivered the knockout punch. The new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was one of the Republican senators who opposed the bill and prevented its success. A look at his history on criminal justice paints a complicated picture that leans toward favoring harsh punishment over rehabilitation, which calls into question his commitment to promoting racial equality broadly and criminal justice reform specifically. During Sessions’ confirmation hearing, Rep. Cedric Richmond (D–Calif.) said, “Sen. Sessions has advanced an agenda that will do great harm to African-American citizens and communities.” Additionally, civil rights leader Sen. John Lewis (D–Ga.) said, “Those who are committed to equal justice in our society wonder whether Sen. Sessions’ calls for law and order will mean today what it meant in Alabama when I was coming up back then.” How valid are those fears, and can we really assume that criminal justice reform will be prevented at a national level for the next four to eight years? That’s a hard question to answer at this point in the administration, but a look at the new White House website might be the best indication we have right now. The website does not show criminal justice reform as one of the top issues but does cite “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community” as a pressing concern. Though this is surely a noble goal, it is simply not a sufficient response to the problems plaguing the criminal justice system. In fact, unquestioning and unconditional support of law enforcement can be dangerous when police are abusing their power. Federal investigations have been essential in exposing the systemic violation of the law and racial discrimination by police departments, such as in Ferguson and Chicago. Under the heading of “Standing Up For Our Law Enforcement Community,” the White House website states, “Our country needs more law enforcement, more community engagement, and more effective policing.” If correctly implemented, these changes could certainly help improve our criminal justice system. But they won’t mean anything in the absence of comprehensive reform. This means that there must be substantial changes to sentencing laws and reentry programming. It also means that police and prisons need to continue to be held accountable for discrimination and unjustified use of force. These goals may seem impossible, or at least impractical, in the new administration, but it’s important to remember that change does not need to happen at a federal level to make a difference. State legislation has, can and will make a huge difference in the battle for criminal justice reform. In Michigan, for example, a 19-bill package was re-introduced that would reform the state’s parole and probation systems. It’s time for us to push our state legislators to pick up where our national legislators left off. Our administration may have changed since last October when I went to see Piper Kerman talk and criminal justice reform was all but certain. However, we as a nation have not changed, and we can work to enact change ourselves. A fter the election, like many of my fellow students, I had mixed feelings. However, unlike many of my friends, I felt a small sense of relief. I knew that this was going to be a time of incredible upheaval and chaos in our country; however, I was to be exempt from that chaos as I was planning on studying abroad for the first five months of the Donald Trump administration. For weeks, I bragged that I wasn’t going to have to deal with the “peaceful exchange of power” because I would be nearly 4,000 miles away. For my first few weeks in Paris, I tried my best not to think about Trump. Every time my host mother brought up something he had said on TV I would quickly change the subject. I would casually scroll through my Facebook feed, stopping on the occasional cat video and not much else. I was under the impression that I had escaped (for the time being) and attempted to focus on my life abroad. What I didn’t realize was just how small this world has become. With the advent of nearly ubiquitous access to social media, there is no such thing as “escaping to another country” anymore. I thought back to all the people who threatened to move to Canada after Trump’s election, hoping they had realized by now that running away is the opposite of a solution. While his policies may not directly affect me while I’m a resident of France, that doesn’t mean I don’t hear about them or feel the emotional blowback from knowing that his policies are affecting many people I love. My attitude completely changed the day of the Women’s March on Paris. I woke up late the day after the inauguration and lazily checked my Facebook feed. I saw that one of my new friends from my program in Paris had posted that he would be attending the Women’s March. I checked out the Facebook event and after about 30 seconds of deliberating if I would rather stay in bed, I decided to go. I quickly found out that nearly every student from my study abroad program was also going. A group of my fellow students and I met up and watched as thousands upon thousands of people slowly gathered in Human Rights Square in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. Being the unorganized international students that we are, none of us remembered to bring signs, but we spent a great deal of time admiring the signs around us in both French and English. We quickly realized that many of the people around us were American, not French. I had no idea there were this many of us in Paris. The march finally began and, as I’m sure many others who participated in the marches around the world did, I felt an overwhelming sense of solidarity — a feeling that I’m not sure I had felt in my time abroad thus far. While our program requires that we speak French at all times, we all slowly slipped into English, feeling that this protest constituted a reasonable exception to the rule. All around us, bands played, people danced and crowds shouted chants in both French and English. What the march made me realize is that politics is a global issue, not just a national one. It is now estimated that the march reached millions of women in the United States and across the globe, making it the biggest peaceful protest in American history. Personally, I have never been a part of an event that massive in my entire life. Before the march, I didn’t want anything to do with American politics; they had exhausted me while I was back home and all I wanted was an escape. After the march, I was so incredibly grateful to have the chance to stand up for what I believe in while abroad. It gave me hope, it made me feel like I still have a place in the debate, it made me want to get involved again. Most importantly, it woke me up. Opinion The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com 4— Thursday, January 26, 2017 Thinking, not doing AUSTIN XU | OP-ED I ’m an engineer. You know, one of those elitist hermits who resides on North Campus and only occasionally takes the Bursley-Baits bus down to chastise those unfortunate non-engineers on Central Campus? Yep. Even worse, I’m an electrical engineer. You know … from the EECS department? I’m one of those snobs. I believe that being an engineer is just as difficult as any major in “LS and Play.” There may be differences in workload, scheduling and campuses, but at the end of the day, a college education is about learning. Yet I feel “learning” has become somewhat lost in the day-to-day clutter of college lives. For me to fully encompass college, I strive to understand the how and why behind concepts, not just how to solve problems. After all, learning is just the beginning of my journey; an in-depth grasp of the underlying ideas enables me to innovate with a full comprehension of the problem at hand. With club meetings, research, work, term papers and weekly homework sets, “learning” has been overtaken by what I call “doing.” My mother has always told me that education is the one thing that cannot be taken from me. Wherever I go, whatever I do, a higher education is invaluable. And it’s not because I can memorize an entire chart of Laplace transformations, recite Maxwell’s equations or tell the difference between dynamic and static polymorphism. No, these explicit things — or any of the numerous equations and facts I’ve crammed into my head — are not going to land me a job or even advance my academic career. You may stop me here and ask, “Don’t you need to know those things to do well?” We’ve arrived at my point. How I define academic success isn’t through a number out of four or even 4.4 (I’m looking at you, Ross), but rather by how much I have thought, am thinking and will think. Because at the end of the day, education comes down to teaching a set of critical thinking skills. It’s easy to get caught up in “doing things.” But what does this mean? Time and time again, I have heard people say, “Oh, it won’t be bad after I memorize these equations,” or “I’ll just pack my cheat sheet with these equations.” Number crunching. Plug and chug. Is that the point of our education? When we step into the workforce, we have all the resources available to us. There’s no need to memorize the formulas off the top of your head. In the real world, job performance is ultimately measured by how much you think. Once again: thinking. I’m a firm believer that understanding course material, making sure you know how the equations are derived, how the certain relationships are formed or why a certain concept is the way it is serves a far greater purpose than memorizing. And it’s not just me who thinks that way. Eric Mazur, a professor at Harvard University, felt the same way after testing his introductory- level students conceptually. In his article on assumptions in education, Mazur describes the outcomes from traditional lecture and from an alternative approach where students are required to read the material before coming to a discussion- based class facilitated by iClickers. He found in the alternative approach students were able to better internalize the material, which led to improved performance on both conceptual and traditional problems. While this article was published more than eight years ago, the message is timeless: A fundamental understanding of concepts enables students to generalize their approach to any given problem while honing their critical thinking skills. Rote memorization will only get you so far. It might get you a college degree, but it doesn’t advance you as a person. It doesn’t develop the critical analysis skills that are necessary to do any job, let alone an engineering job. It robs you of your time at an institution of higher learning. Having an in-depth understanding of the material presented in class certainly helps. Sure, you may never use 90 percent of the class material, but having that baseline knowledge to build off of serves as the foundation of comprehending high-level problems in the “real world.” By knowing the underlying theory and relationships of the final product or solution, as an engineer I can easily identify problems I may encounter, outline different routes to take and then decide between trade-offs. As someone who used the brute force of memorization to get through high school, it is probably hypocritical of me to comment on learning. But the more time I spend here at the University of Michigan, the more success I find in diving deeply into the course material, picking the brains of professors and exploring the world through research. I’ll only be in such an academic environment once, an environment where people are obsessed with learning. It makes me want to learn. Think. Question. Examine. This translates not only in class but also to projects where I can “get my hands dirty” and build something. My mother was right, but her words need a bit of tweaking. The critical thinking gained through higher education is the one thing that cannot be taken from me. From today to the day I take my last steps on campus, to the day I take my last steps at my workplace, I hope to be learning, exploring and, of course, thinking. REBECCA LERNER Managing Editor 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. EMMA KINERY Editor in Chief ANNA POLUMBO-LEVY and REBECCA TARNOPOL Editorial Page Editors Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors. Carolyn Ayaub Megan Burns Samantha Goldstein Caitlin Heenan Jeremy Kaplan Max Lubell Alexis Megdanoff Madeline Nowicki Anna Polumbo-Levy Jason Rowland Ali Safawi Kevin Sweitzer Rebecca Tarnopol Ashley Tjhung Stephanie Trierweiler EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS Austin Xu is a sophomore in the College of Engineering. Women’s march abroad TYREE COWELL | STUDY ABROAD SERIES Criminal injustice MARY KATE WINN | COLUMN Mary Kate Winn can be reached at winnm@umich.edu. Tyree Cowell is a junior in LSA studying abroad in Paris, France. MARY KATE WINN TYREE COWELL AUSTIN XU CONTRIBUTE TO THE CONVERSATION Readers are encouraged to submit letters to the editor and op-eds. Letters should be fewer than 300 words while op-eds should be 550 to 850 words. Send the writer’s full name and University affiliation to tothedaily@michigandaily.com. —Women’s march on Washington national co -chair, Linda Sarsourin an op-ed for Women’s Media Center. “ NOTABLE QUOTABLE Women are intersectional human beings who live multi-issued lives. When we are protected, when we are respected, when we are able to thrive and given the same opportunities as our male counterparts... — our nation will rise.”