criminal Justice movie event

Aaron Bañuelos

Soc. 122

 

Criminal Justice Movie Event 

On Monday May 9, 2016 a fellow group member and I held a movie event in order to spread the word about the criminal justice system. The movie we decided to show was a documentary by the name of "Chasing Madoff" which, we streamed through Amazon Prime. The documentary covered the ten-year chase that Harry Markopolos pursued to take down Bernie Madoff who was operating a multi-billion dollar ponzi scheme. Through this film we were able to learn how white-collar crime is typically overlooked until eventually it implodes and breaks itself out to the media. In the documentary Harry Markopolos brought overwhelming evidence to Security and Exchange Commission (SEC); however, each time the evidence would get pushed aside or shut down by the higher ups for no further investigation. In order to spread the word for our event I told classmates about the movie, posted a showing time and location on my twitter account, and Dr. Kubal also advertised the event to students. Although the turn out was not really great I feel that those who showed up including myself learned a lot about how different crimes attract different attention. After the film we held an open discussion about the film and how it made us feel. Overall those who showed up seemed to really enjoy the film and had positive things to say about it as a film; however, when it came to the discussion about the feel and how it made us feel we all agreed that it actually made us kind of sad considering it took ten years to stop the Ponzi scheme resulting in just over fifty billion dollars of lost money, which included average Americans retirements and life savings. I feel that if I were to hold this event again one thing that I would do differently would be to hold this event earlier in the semester because I feel that since we held it toward the end of the semester  before finals more students were unable to attend due to studying for finals; however, I still feel that this event was a success and I really enjoyed holding it!