I knew when I was on my third hour of the introduction that Michelle Alexander was not messing around in The New Jim Crow. Exhaustively researched, this book drops like a megaton bomb into the quiet assumptions we make about ourselves and our "so-called" criminal justice system.
And the shocking thing for me at least, is that I already knew a lot of the pieces presented here. I went to law school. I clerked for two years for the Cook County States Attorney's office and I saw plea after plea go down in the felony trial division. But seeing all the pieces I had seen and experienced put together like this, it was like I had been seeing pieces of a puzzle for over a decade and now finally saw the picture that the pieces made.
And it's not pretty. The puzzle is a horribly crippling and unjust system that perpetuates poverty and violence in communities of color. It's a system that tags people with the word "felon" and then never lets them go. It is a lifelong stigma and legal leash on people who are arrested and convicted many times for doing the same thing other people are doing in the less-policed suburbs of America, or the dorm rooms of our higher learning institutions.
How do we move on from here? How do we dismantle the War on Drugs when so many private interests are now invested in its perpetuation? Because that is the next step. It has to be. Lives have been destroyed. Communities have been destroyed. And for what? So the haves can keep having and the have-nots can foot the bill. Because in the communities of the affluent, these will continue to be "mistakes" and in poor communities, they are crimes.
4/5 Stars.
Over the past couple of years, I have tried to focus on black authors for the month of February. I had taken a look at the authors I was reading and found that I was gravitating to authors that looked a lot like me, namely white women of means. It's probably why I didn't understand the controversy surrounding the book, The Help (I went to an author talk and was quoted in a Chicago Tribune story about how much I liked the book - gulp). So I started reading more black authors and listening more intently to black voices. And what I learned, was that I knew nothing.The Sun Does Shine was my fifth book for Black History Month. I had just finished Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy and Anthony Ray Hinton is mentioned towards the end. So although I felt tired and worn down by stories of racial injustice in our criminal prosecution system, I felt compelled to read Ray's story.Five books. I felt worn down by the black experience. All those stories of marginalization, silencing, tone policing, tokenism, violence. I had READ them. So what does this kind of racism do to those that live these lives? It weathers them. (There's a very good article explaining just what "weathering" is here: https://psmag.com/social-justice/raci....) I work in health care. I'm aware of the health discrepancies between whites and minorities. And I too thought it was likely due to income inequality, but it's so much more insidious than this.
Anthony Ray Hinton spent 30 years on Alabama's death row as an innocent man. The shear magnitude of this injustice cannot be counted in days or dollars. That the state continued to deprive him of his freedom even when confronted with its inadequate evidence was so infuriating to read. When confronted with proof of innocence, the state was more willing to turn away from the proof to maintain a status quo. What was one more black man in the penitentiary system anyway?While I was reading this book, the State of Alabama executed Nathaniel Woods. While serving an arrest warrant on Mr. Woods, police entered the house to arrest him and he surrendered. Woods' roommate, fearing he would be arrested, opened fire killing three officers and wounding a fourth. Both men were sentenced to death in Alabama. The state argued that Woods was just as culpable under a theory of accomplice murder, even though he never fired a shot and was in the process of surrendering when the officers were killed. Woods had not lived a perfect life. But he was black. The officers were white, and this was Alabama. And the old me, that person attending a reading of The Help, might have scoffed at the idea that race had anything to do with it. But that person didn't know that 84% of executions in modern era Alabama have been for crimes involving white victims, even though only 20% of the state's homicide victims are white. (you can read more about Nathaniel Woods here).We could also discuss that in Alabama a jury can recommend life in prison, but the judge can override this decision and sentence a prisoner to death. Or that only 10/2 jurors can recommend the death penalty. Or that Alabama has no state-funded system for providing lawyers to death row prisoners. Don't have money? Your appointed lawyer will be given $1,000 to mount your defense and it's likely he/she has never defended a capital case before. It doesn't take common sense to understand that rich people with endless resources and money avoid the death penalty.Yet this is a system that millions insist is providing value to our country. This is a system that has executed more than 1,500 people since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 but has exonerated more than 160 since 1973. This is an error rate that can't be ignored, unless you're okay with the idea of executing innocent people.I wish Anthony Ray Hinton many more years of freedom and if I'm ever blessed enough to hear him speak in person I will be sure to tell him that our country doesn't deserve the grace he showed in "weathering" this type of injustice.
4/5 Stars.
There's a wonderful momentum in setting a wrong right. There's an incredible grace in redemption and acceptance. Bryan Stevenson is a vessel of grace. Through the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson brings hope, comfort, acceptance, and redemption to those to whom the "justice" system in our country has terribly failed.
In Just Mercy, Stevenson says again and again that people are more than the worst thing they have ever done. It's one thing to say this kind of thing, but it's another to actually believe it, and through your life and actions, show others that this is true.
The history of the death penalty in the United States is a shameful story of unequal application disproportionately affecting the poor and people of color. How then is it justice? (spoiler alert, it's not). The fact that this country has absolutely put to death innocent people should give anyone pause as they talk about the reasonableness of the ultimate punishment. Couple this inexact science with the long history of racial discrimination in this country and you have a disgraceful recipe for injustice in the name of justice.
When Stevenson graduated from Harvard Law School, he set about with a mission to help others. And over the past couple of decades, he's done just that. He's championed cases such as that of Walter McMillan, sentenced to death in Alabama for a crime he did not commit, and of hundreds of children serving life sentences in our nation's penitentiaries. There is a better way, and it's because of people like Bryan Stevenson and his tireless fight for justice reform that we may someday earn the description "justice system."
5/5 Stars.
