☆ "Justice-involved?" Language expert unpacks Supe Ellenberg's latest language contortions
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Noted linguist Dr. Alan Perlman notes that euphemisms—the sometimes awkward efforts to rename people and ideas to avoid unwanted connotations—can end up obscuring more than they illuminate. He takes a look at County Supe Ellenberg's latest use of the gauzy "justice-involved" word-choice to describe people slotted for her widely-panned "jail-diversion" site in South San Jose. An Opp Now exclusive.
Euphemisms can be well-meaning, but they won’t work if the words to be replaced are traditional, useful, and/or sufficiently precise. You cannot rewrite the dictionary, arbitrarily replacing established words/phrases, and expect that your new items, with broad and presumably inoffensive meanings, will be adopted.
This is the problem faced by the Fortune Society. (Whenever someone says, “Words matter,” they mean “my words matter.”) They want very much for you not to have unpleasant thoughts about certain classes of people. So they give you new words to say, e.g., instead of offender, inmate, felon, criminal, prisoner, or delinquent, you should say “person or individual with justice system involvement … impacted by the justice system [or] … affected by the justice system.”
The website gives nine classes of substitution, all totally unworkable, and not only because it’s exceedingly difficult to replace established words. The effort fails on practical grounds, replacing one word with a glut of bureaucratic jargon (which nobody will adopt), as above.
Some substitutes are vacuous, adding unnecessary or redundant information. Someone we describe as “homeless” is of course a “person currently or previously experiencing homelessness.” What alternatives are there? Some of the substitutes seem to defeat their purpose. Replacing “sex offender” with “person … with sex offense convictions” reminds one of the person’s criminality.
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors opted for the euphemism in discussing the people in its housing relocation program. Board President Susan Ellenberg said in a news article, “Concerns about the population demographic of future residents should be addressed, particularly if those residents are justice-involved or formerly justice-involved or formerly unhoused.”
This takes the euphemism to another level: “justice-impacted” implies that the justice system had some effect on a person’s life. “Justice-involved”—to me, that could be anybody in the system: stenographers, security guards, and others.
No, we definitely do not want people to think of their criminal history. Yet this is exactly what “justice-impacted” means, according to the website LSAC, which provides an all-encompassing, lawyerly definition:
“Justice-impacted individuals include those who have been incarcerated or detained in a prison, immigration detention center, local jail, juvenile detention center, or any other carceral setting … convicted but not incarcerated … charged but not convicted … or … arrested.”
So wait a minute: justice-involved/impacted is supposed to make us not think of criminality, but an authoritative website defines it as any of several situations that entail criminal behavior. I.e., "here's what we're trying to cover up." Another failed euphemism. Again, no one is fooled.
Perlman has a PhD in linguistics. He practices forensic linguistics in Rindge, NH. www.language-expert.net
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