Former Little Hawk Journalism executive editor Mira Bohannan Kumar ‘20 published more stories on the website than anyone else. She wrote about topics from Student Senate, to local and national politics, and even biking. Nowadays, she’s more interested in exploring philosophy and law.
Now a student at Harvard Law School, she got her B.A. in Philosophy, and Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences from Wellesley College, just outside Boston. Her research interest in philosophy focuses on the constructs of space, time, and the constraints society puts on people, as well as the treatment of incarcerated people in the United States.
Q: What did Little Hawk Journalism mean to you in high school?
A: [Journalism] was my number one thing, I used to read every article that went up on the website and copy edit everything that went into the newspaper myself. There’s something really special about getting the opportunity as a student to produce a product that embodies values that you think are important, and to have people really read it and actually care what you say. The Little Hawk and student government were big parts of my life. People really read our newspaper. I wrote an op-ed criticizing the school dress code and it was substantially changed. It’s so easy for young people who don’t feel heard, and being on the newspaper and having people actually see what you believe is a really important form of power.
Q: What was your favorite thing you did with Little Hawk Journalism?
A: I really enjoyed an article that I wrote my senior year about a fellow classmate and her family who had immigrated from Sudan, we got to talk about her family’s story and that was a really interesting experience that helps you see how just one person can be so important to a global dynamic, and we see that in the law too. There can be one representative whose story transcends and we can see a broad injustice. I just really enjoyed the process of the newspaper, I liked working with other students developing their skills and the team aspect of it.
Q: What are you doing now?
A: I graduated from college in May of 2024, I was doing a lot of pretrial and post conviction and compassionate release and clemency work. Now I just study, but I’m in Harvard Defenders, a public defense oriented organization, focusing on especially low income clients in the Massachusetts courts at the show cause stage. Our clients have been arrested and there’s a report, we go before a clerk magistrate to defend them from potential charges. That work helps to stop entrapment and helps people maintain their lives and not to lose resources because of something that may or may not have happened. I really love learning from older students and getting to observe lawyers & what they’re doing and seeing how people can work together to stop encroachment.
Q: What actually is the clemency process?
A: There are not a lot of ways if you’re in prison to exit before the end of the sentence, but a lot of people look for ways to end it on just sentence or exit because of other circumstances. Some have medical needs or illnesses and that’s called compassionate release. Iowa is one of a few states that doesn’t have compassionate release. A lot of people are elderly, and even though they have good reason to be released, they can’t be.
Clemency functions to allow those who are terminally ill or not getting health care that they need in prison (prison health care is bad) to exit and rejoin the community or get medical care that they need. Clemency goes right to the president federally, or governors at the state level. Kim Reynolds has never granted clemency in Iowa, she gets many applications and denies them all. Many are for people with a long sentence with families and other medical needs. Even when the Iowa Parole Board recommends release, she doesn’t do it. There are many circumstances where we can see that the justice system wasn’t working when someone was convicted. Accelerating the death penalty without further review is just wrong, regardless of what you believe about the death penalty in general.
Q: I saw that you’re interested in going beyond the prison state? Can you describe that to me?
A: I think there are a few things here, there are a lot of strong arguments for incarceration, but also a lot of real systemic problems with the way we run the criminal justice system. We need appropriate resources and dignity. A lot of what we call crime stems from people not having what they need and real systemic problems in society. The US has a much higher crime rate than other comparable countries, and that’s not random, it has to do with the way that we run our society and how we choose to handle interpersonal harm. There’s harm in incarceration and harm in people hurting each other. We have by far the highest incarceration rate in the world. The idea that we need to be providing resources to communities most affected by crime is one that’s been studied. Researchers have found a lot of new solutions recently, but a lot of these solutions are not being implemented and our system isn’t doing a good job at preventing crime. What we want is for people not to want to harm each other.
