Portrait of Walt Whitman (1873) Long before modern conversations about criminal justice reform, the great poet Walt Whitman challenged readers to look at the condemned from a different perspective. In You Felons on Trial in Courts , Whitman identifies himself with the accused and convicted and asks why he isn't locked up with them. After all, he, like all of us, has committed his fair share of sins. So why do we segregate certain sinners from the rest of society? Circumstance