A Typewriter in Kenya, and the Need for Global Justice Journalism

The Global Post -- an excellent source of news from around the world -- ran a story recently on a Kenyan prison with a paralegal class and a single typewriter.

It's an inspiring -- and frustrating -- story. A Christian legal organization called CLEAR runs a paralegal training class in Kenya's Kisumu prison. Prisoners help one another with appeals and they learn a trade they'll be able to practice once they're released.

But here's the frustrating part: the prison office has a single typewriter, and every appeals goes through it. Since appeals in Kenya need to have seven copies, it takes a while to get a single document written. The appeals process was paralyzed recently when the typewriter broke down.

This case tells us a great deal about justice in the developing world, and I've written before about how something as simple as paperwork can cause terrible injustices. But I want to focus for a moment on the reporting itself.

Global Post is a startup site launched last year by a cable news executive and a foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe. The site aims to build a community of correspondents around the world into a new type of news organization. It's a unique model and one worth watching. This story about Kenya was written for Global Post by Ian MacLellan, a Tufts student studying abroad. This is one of Global Post's projects: training students to be international reporters while they study abroad and publishing their content on the web. I'm interested to see where it leads.

I believe we need more stories like the one MacLellan wrote in Kenya. The mainstream media isn't doing it, and the world's justice systems are suffering from a lack of open, reliable information. Models like Global Post and Global Voices have the potential to raise the level of reporting and discussion on justice issues around the world, something that's badly needed.

Then, once we start getting reliable stories about what works -- and what doesn't -- in the justice systems around the world, we need the mechanisms to act on this information. This leads me to something else I've written about here in the past  the need for more social enterprise ventures in the world of criminal justice. (I just came across a post of mine on this from one year ago today. Time flies.)  A single computer for this prison would streamline the appeals process, it might help identify the wrongfully convicted prisoners and correct a few injustices.

There are countless stories like the Kenyan typewriter, where a computer or a shipment of medical supplies or a construction project could bring about sweeping positive change in a prison or a court or a justice ministry. By connecting the world's information and rethinking the social justice model, we can do a better job of sparking criminal justice reforms around the world.

Photo by welcometoalville