Just Mercy – Part 1

Our Broken System

Last month I watched the movie Just Mercy. I think that saying I was moved goes without saying. I am not sure how you could watch it and not be moved. If you haven’t seen it or read the book, I highly recommend it.

Even before I watched it, I knew I also wanted to read the book. I was able to get Just Mercy adopted for young adults from the library. I haven’t read the original book, but I believe the main different is some of the details are left out of the young adult version.

I am generally more moved by a movie than a book. I think I can just get more emotionally invested when I see it. But I am thankful that I did both.

The movie is mostly about the true story of Walter McMillian who was wrongly accused of murder and the work of Bryan Stevenson (a young attorney) and the Equal Justice Initiative to secure his freedom. I am not going to write much about the details of that particular case because I want you to watch the movie. The book covers a lot of other cases that aren’t in the movie and has a lot more information and stats about how flawed our justice system is.

The book describes how our justice system negatively and disproportionately affects people of color, the poor, children and women. Because I have so much to say, I am actually writing this in four parts. This post will mostly be about some general issues with our justice and prison system. In the other three parts, I am going to talk specifically about how it affects children, women and racism in general. I will link to all of them at the end of this post. A lot of the information is from the book, which is often identified by quotes and italics. All of the quotes are taken from the book. I wanted you to know where I received the information and stats. I have also sprinkled in my own thoughts.

I was really bothered by the reality, information and description of things that have happened and that I know continue to happen. It breaks my heart that our justice system is so flawed. I am so thankful for people like Bryan Stevenson and the EJI. The lack of justice both saddens me deeply and also angers me. I found my self wishing I had become a lawyer and honestly wondering why I never considered it.

The justice system needs changed and I don’t pretend to know how to do it. It is deeply flawed and needs a total overhaul. I don’t know if we will see that happen, but I sure hope we do.

“Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In the early 1970s, the prison population was 300,000 people; currently it’s 2.3 million people. Nearly 6 million people are on probation or on parole. One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated. To be clear, these numbers reflect who is being convicted and incarcerated, not who is necessarily committing crimes.

We have shot, hanged, gassed, electrocuted, and lethally injected hundreds of people in the name of the law. Thousands more await their execution in the second of prisons known as death row. We’ve sent a quarter million kids, some under the age of twelve, to adult jails and prisons. For years, we’ve been the only country in the world that condemns children to life imprisonment without parole.

We’ve created laws that make nonviolent offenses – like writing a bad check or committing a petty theft – result in life imprisonment. We have locked away people with substance abuse problems, with more than a half million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses.

We’ve given up on rehabilitation, education, and services for the imprisoned because providing assistance to the incarcerated is apparently too kind and compassionate…

Finally, we spend lots of money on prisons, nearly $80 billion every year. To cover the cost, state governments have taken away funds from public services, education, health, and welfare. In fact private prison builders and prison service companies have paid millions of dollars to sate and local governments, trying to convince them to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences, and keep more people locked up so that they can increase profits. The privatization of mass incarceration is a moneymaker for a few and costly nightmare for the rest of us – and it has ruined efforts to improve public safety, reduce the cost of mass incarceration, and most significantly, promote rehabilitation of the incarcerated.”

It is sad to me that as a developed country that is supposed to be the end all be all place to live, that our answer to crime is almost always jail or prison. I can’t imagine this is the proper response in most situations. Why is that the thing we willing to do most of the time. We are we not focused on rehabilitation and helping find another way? I can’t imagine how much more crime and violence that the prison and justice system has caused. There is so much corruption within both systems.

The book addresses that not only are many of the injustices of our justice system aimed at people of color, but often the poor are unlikely to get fair or equal treatment. Your financial status will most likely determine whether you will be able to get fair treatment or attention.

“Many poor and minority victims, or victims who had family members who were incarcerated, noted that they were not getting calls or support from local police or prosecutors. If your family had lost a loved one to murder or had to suffer the anguish of rape or assault, your victimization might be ignored or taken less seriously. The expansion of victims’ rights ultimately made formal what had always been true: some victim are more protected and valued than others.”

The other area that our justice system does a poor job is for those with mental illness and those with cognitive or mental disabilities. I have always thought that many crimes are committed due to mental illness and what people really need is help and rehabilitation, not just punishment.

“Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness. In fact, there are more than three times the number of seriously mentally ill individuals in jail or prison than in hospitals; in some states that number is ten times. And prison is a terrible place for someone with mental illness or a neurological disorder that prison guards are not trained to understand.

Most prisons are overcrowded and don’t have the capacity to provide care or treatment for those with mental illness. Many people with disabilities aren’t able to comply with the rules of prison. Frustrated staff often subject them to abusive punishment or solitary confinement. Lawyers, prosecutors and judges do a poor job of recognizing mental illness or disabilities which lead to wrongful conviction, longer sentences and high rates of returning to prison.”

“Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the “prison-industrial complex” – the business interests that capitalized on prison construction – made imprisonment profitable. Incarceration became the answer to everything. Health care problems like drug additions? Poverty that led someone to write a bad check? Child behavioral disorders? Managing the mentally disabled? Undocumented immigration? The solution according to legislators was to send people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.”

2011 was the first time in close to 40 years that the prison population did not increase. 2012 saw the first decline in prison population in decades.

Towards the end of the book Bryan talks about our brokenness. Sometimes we are broken by our own choices but other times by things out of control. He also stated that also our brokenness is the source of our common humanity. We all share a search for comfort, meaning and healing. He goes on to say that when we share vulnerability and imperfection it gives us capacity for compassion.

“We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, deny compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity…”

and then while thinking of the people that would soon be executing one of his clients as well as those that may even cheer his death, he said…

“I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disable, and allowed the imprisonment of the sick and the weak – not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation, but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken.

…Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done…If someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer.

...In fact, there is strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness. Embracing our brokenness creates a desire for mercy, and perhaps a need to show to others, too. When you experience mercy, you being to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.

All of the sudden, I felt stronger, I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our shortcomings, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to kill the broken among us that have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized. If we acknowledge our brokenness, perhaps we would no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in treating our most vulnerable peers with indifference.”

We are all broken but we don’t always like to admit it. And when we do admit it, are we just admitting it to make ourselves feel better about our own brokenness? We need to recognize that we are all broken to motivate us to have compassion and mercy for each other.

Bryan references a time when he spoke at a church about the women that was accused of adultery and brought to Jesus. This is a pretty well known parable so we know that Jesus said, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” Her accusers left and Jesus offered her forgiveness.

“But today, our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused us to hurl stones at the people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion. I told the congregation that we simply can’t watch that happen. I told them we have to be stone-catchers.”

What a world this would be if we all were stone catchers for each other.

As I mentioned, a large part of the movie and even the book is about the challenge of securing freedom for the wrongly accused, Walter McMillian. When Bryan was finally able to obtain Walter’s freedom he said this to the judge.

“Your Honor, I just want to say this before we adjourn. It was far too easy to convict this wrongly accused man for murder and send him to death row for something he didn’t do and much too hard to win his freedom after proving his innocence. We have serious problems and important work that must be done in this state.”

I know that his release happened in the 1990’s, but please don’t think this isn’t still relevant today.

Between 1990 and 1992, Bryan Stevenson and EJI won reversals in death penalty cases for 16 prisoners! That is sixteen people that were on death row and almost lost their lives because of false convictions.

Bryan Stevenson and EJI have won relief for 100 (probably more now) death row prisoners in Alabama. Just Alabama! In 2013, Alabama recorded its lowest number of new death sentences since the mid 1970’s.

When I finished watching the movie, I thought to myself; how can we still have a death penalty? This isn’t the first time I had wondered this. But the thought of it made me ill. I don’t know how anyone could value life and also be a proponent of the death penalty. On top of that, there are so many cases of people being wrongly accused, imprisoned, sent to death row and executed. Some of those cases have been found in time and people’s lives have been spared, but how many have not been found?

I will end this post with this thought. Bryan said these words as he spoke at Walter’s funeral in 2013. These words spoke to me as much, if not more,than any other words in this book.

“I told the congregation that Walter’s case had taught me that the death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit. The real question of capital punishment in this country is Do we deserve to kill?

Part 2: Our broken system and children Part 3: Our broken system and women Part 4: Our broken system and racism

Just Mercy – Part 2

Our Broken System & Children

This is a continuation of my thoughts about the book and movie, Just Mercy. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to read Part 1 first.

The movie, if I remember correctly, doesn’t hit on any of these cases or how horribly our system treats children. Reading this book has definitely opened my eyes to how unfair our system is and how it contributes to children never really getting a fair shot. It is truly heart breaking.

I am sure I have been guilty of hearing about a horrific crime by a minor and wondering how a child could do something so terrible and also thinking they should be tried as an adult. I will no longer think this way. The way our society views and treats criminal juveniles is heart breaking. They need our help. Instead we put them in a situation where coming out and having anything but a life of crime is an incredible uphill battle.

The book tells the story of Trina. Trina was the youngest of 12 kids and lived in a the poorest section of Chester, Pennsylvania.

“Chester had extraordinarily high rates of poverty, crime and unemployment – and the worst ranked public school system among Pennsylvania’s 501 districts. Nearly 46 percent of the city’s children were living below the federal poverty level.”

Trina’s father was a violent and abusive alcoholic. Trina’s mom was sickly after bearing so many children and enduring all of the abuse by her husband. I won’t go into the details from the book but just know it was an AWFUL living situation. Trina showed signed of intellectual disabilities at a young age. Her mother died when she was nine.

Eventually, due to the sexual abuse at the hands of their father, Trina and two of her older sisters ran away. At one point they tried to stay with one of their older sisters, but her husband began to sexually abuse them. Trina had a lot of emotional and mental abuse problems and would sometimes get so ill she would end up in the hospital, but she was never allowed stay long enough to recover because of her lack of money.

One night, at the age of 14, she and a friend climbed through a window of a home to visit the two boys that lived there. Since it was dark, she lit a match to try to use the light to make way through the house and the house caught fire. The two boys that were sleeping died from smoke asphyxiation. She was accused of starting the fire intentionally.

She was so traumatized by the boys’ death that she was nonfunctional. Her appointed lawyer never filed the proper paperwork to show she was incompetent to stand trial or challenge the State’s decision to try her as an adult. She was tried for second-degree murder as an adult.

“Pennsylvania sentencing law was inflexible: the only sentence for those convicted of second-degree murder was mandatory life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.”

“Judge Reed, who presided over the case, expressed serious misgivings about the sentence he was enforced to impose, given Trina’s devastating life circumstances and the fact that she hadn’t intended to harm anyone.”

“This is the saddest case I’ve ever seen.”

Judge Reed – quoted in the book Just Mercy

“For a tragic crime committed at fourteen, Trina was condemned to die in prison. At the age of sixteen, Trina walked through the gates of the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, an adult prison for women, terrified, still suffering from trauma, and mental illness and intensely vulnerable – with the knowledge that she would never leave…Not long after she arrived at Muncy, a male correctional officer pulled her into a secluded area and raped her.”

They discovered the crime once she became pregnant, but as is often the case, the correctional officer was fired but not criminally prosecuted. She remained in prison and gave birth to a son while handcuffed to a bed.

“It wasn’t until 2008 that most states abandoned the practice of shackling or handcuffing incarcerated women during delivery.”

By the time Trina was 30 she was in a wheel chair with multiple sclerosis, intellectual disabilities and mental illness related to trauma.

“In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.“

In another story a thirteen year old named Ian, who lived on the streets with no parental supervision, and his two friends attempted to rob a couple in Tampa, Florida. The person resisted and Ian shot her in the cheek. It shattered several teeth and severely damaged her jaw. All of the boys were arrested and charged with armed robbery and attempted homicide. Ian’s lawyer encouraged him to plead guilty and told him he would be sentenced to no more than 15 years. Ian followed the advice of the lawyer, but the lawyer wasn’t aware that two of the crimes were punishable by life in prison without parole. He was sent to an adult prison – Apalachee Correctional Institution – one of the toughest prisons in Florida.

“Juveniles housed in adult prisons are five times more likely to be the victim of sexual assault, so the staff at Apalachee put Ian, who was small for his age, in solitary confinement…Ian spent eighteen years in uninterrupted solitary confinement.”

Did you catch that? Eighteen years of solitary confinement!

Once a month, Ian was allowed to make a phone call. Not too long after he arrived in prison he used his phone call to reach out to his victim, Debbie. He apologized to her and she was moved by his call. They kept in contact. After several years, Debbie tried to get Ian’s sentence reduced. She felt it was too harsh. She talked to prison officials and gave interviews to the press but courts ignored her call for a reduced sentence.

“By 2010, Florida had sentenced more than a hundred children to life imprisonment without parole for non-homicide offenses. All of the youngest condemned children – thirteen or fourteen years of age – were black or Latino. Florida had the largest population in the wold of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.“

Antonio lived in South Central Los Angeles where he was plagued by gang violence. He was abused by his father and witnessed violent exchanges between his parents who threatened to kill each other. He was neglected by his depressed mother.

In 1999, a month after he turned 13, he was shot by a stranger while riding his bicycle. His fourteen year old brother, Jose, ran to his aid but was shot and killed. Antonio was hospitalized for weeks. He was sent to live in Las Vegas to try to recover with family. He was relieved to be able to put gang violence behind him. But within a year, California probation authorities ordered his return.

“He was on probation for a prior minor offense. In poor urban neighborhoods across the United States, black and brown boys are routinely targeted by the police. Even though many of these kids have done nothing wrong, they are stopped, presumed guilty, and suspected of being dangerous or engaged in criminal activity. The random stops, questioning, and harassment dramatically increase the risk of arrest for petty crimes. Many of these children develop criminal records for behavior that wealthier children engage in without consequences.“

Antonio went back to South Central but struggled. He ended up getting a gun for self-defense but was quickly arrested and sent to juvenile camp where it was reported that he responded well to structure and guidance.

But at age 14, while at a party, he was invited into a strange plan by men twice his age to fake a kidnapping to get money from the ransom. They insisted Antonio join them. But the plan went wrong and they ended up being chased by a van and the adults instructed Antonio to shoot at the van. The men chasing them were under cover officers. When they saw marked police officers, Antonio dropped the gun and they crashed into a tree. Antonio (and the driver) were charged with aggravated and attempted murder of a police officer.

Antonio and his 27 year old co defendant were tried together. They were found guilty. Antionio was sentenced to prison until death claiming he was a dangerous gang member who could never change or be rehabilitated, despite his difficult childhood and absence of any significant criminal history. He was sentenced to one of California’s most dangerous and overcrowded adult prisons. Antonio became the youngest person in the US condemned to die in prison for a crime in which no one was physically injured.

“In an earlier era, if you were thirteen or fourteen when you committed a crime, you would find yourself in the adult system with a lengthy sentence only if the crime was unusually high profile – or committed by a black or brown child against a white person in the South...

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the politics of fear and anger sweeping the country and fueling mass incarceration was turning its attention to children. Influential criminologists predicted a new generation of “superpredators.” Sometimes expressly focusing on black and brown children, theorists suggested that America would soon be overcome by “elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches” and who “have absolutely no respect for human life.” Across the country, nearly every state created laws to allow children to be prosecuted as adults, thinking that the juvenile justice system wouldn’t be harsh enough. Many states lowered or eliminated the minimum age for trying children as adults, leaving children as young as eight vulnerable to adult prosecution and imprisonment.

Tens of thousands of kids who had previously been managed by the juvenile justice system, with is well-developed protections and requirements for children, were now thrown into an increasingly overcrowded, violent and desperate adult prison system.

The predictions of superpredators proved wildly inaccurate. The juvenile population in America increased from 1994 to 2000, but the juvenile crime rate declined, leading even the academics who had originally supported the superpredator theory to disclaim it. Of course, the admission came too late for kids like Trina, Ian and Antonio.”

In 1989, Joe Sullivan was a thirteen year old with mental disabilities who suffered from neglect and abuse by his father. Joe was convinced by two older boys to rob the home of an older women. The woman was also sexually assaulted which Joe adamantly denied being part of, but admitted to the burglary. There was a lack of evidence but he was still convicted as an adult and sentenced to life without parole.

The state destroyed the biological evidence that might have proved his innocence. By the time EJI was involved twenty years later, the victim and a co-defendant had died which made it hard to challenge the conviction. They decided to challenge the sentence instead as cruel and unusual punishment.

In 2005, the Supreme Court recognized that children and adults required different levels of punishment and the death penalty for juveniles was banned under the Eighth Amendment.

EJI wanted to challenge the idea that any child should receive a sentence of live without parole.

“In May, 2009, the Supreme Court agreed to review Joe Sullivan’s case and the case of Terrance Graham, a sixteen-year old from Jacksonville, Florida, who had also been convicted of a non-homicide and sentenced to life with no parole. It felt like a miracle. There was a possibility that the court might create constitutional relief for all children sentenced to die in prison. Here was a thrilling chance to change the rules across the country.“

The briefs they filed in the US Supreme Court were supported by the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, The American Bar Association and the American Medical Association as well former judges, social workers and civil and human rights groups.

In November 2009, Bryan Stevenson presented oral arguments to the US Supreme Court.

“During the argument, I told the court that the United States is the only country in the world that imposes sentences of life imprisonment without parole on children – a practice that violates international law. We showed the court that these sentences are disproportionately imposed on children of color. We argued that these harsh punishments were created for adult criminals and were never intended for children. I also told the court that to say to any child of thirteen that he is fit only to die in prison is cruel.“

Evan was a fourteen year old in Alabama sentenced to prison for life without parole. He is from a poor white family in North Alabama. He started attempting suicide when he was in elementary school. His parents had drug addictions and were abusive, therefore he was in and out of foster care.

One night a man came to buy drugs from his mom. Evan and his sixteen year old friend went to the man’s house to play cards. The man gave the teens drugs and alcohol. He also sent the boys out to buy more drugs. The boys tried to steal the man’s wallet after he passed out. The man woke up and and jumped on Evan. The other teen hit the man with a baseball bat. Both boys fought back and also set the his trailer on fire. The man died. Evan and the other teen were charged with capital murder. The friend made a deal to get a parole-eligible sentence but Evan received life in prison without parole.

Evan was sent to a maximum security adult prison. Shortly after he arrived, he was attacked by another prison and stabbed nine times. He recovered but was traumatized. He was also disturbed by his own violent crime and couldn’t understand how he could have done something so destructive.

“Most of the juvenile life cases we handled involved clients who shared Evan’s confusion about their adolescent behavior. Many had matured into adults who were much more thoughtful and reflective; they were now capable of making responsible and appropriate decisions. They had all changed in some significant way and were no nothing like the confused children who had committed a violent crime.“

On May 27, 2010, the US Supreme Court announced its decision that sentences of life imprisonment without parole for children convicted of non-homicidal crimes is cruel and unusable punishment and constitutionally impermissible.

In June of 2012, The Supreme Court agree to review Evan’s case and one of another EJI client from Arkansas. After that was heard there was a constitutional ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences imposed on children convicted of homicides.

No child accused of any crime could automatically sentenced to die in prison.

Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, nearly 2000 people condemned to life to die in prison when they were children have been resentenced and have a chance to go home. Nearly 200 people previously sentenced to death in prison as juveniles have been released.

“We continued our work on issue involving children by pursing more cases. I believe that no child under the age of eighteen should be housed with adults in jails or prisons…I am also convinced that very young children should never be tried in adult court. No child of twelve, thirteen or fourteen can defend him or herself in the adult criminal justice system. Wrongful convictions and illegal trials involving young children are too common.“

Because of the changes in the laws by the supreme court and children being sentenced to life without parole, Joe and Ian were released after serving a few more years. Antonio’s judge in Orange County attempted to change his sentence to 175 years instead of life. Bryan had to go back appellate court to get that sentence reduced to something reasonable. Antonio has a chance to be released. Trina’s sentence was reduced and she is eligible to be released.

In other cases in Louisiana, Bryan was able to secure the release of Robert who spent 45 years in prison for a non-homicide crime when he was sixteen. He was the first person to be release because of the Supreme Court’s ban on death-in-prison sentences for juvenile lifers. Joshua, also from Louisiana, was granted release after serving fifty year in prison.

I know this his just one side of the equation. But it is so heart breaking what these children and so many others were put through. I am sure there are some flat out criminal children out there, but I would venture to guess that most juvenile criminals are coming from a not great place or are battling some mental health issues. They need our help not our condemnation.

Once again, I am so thankful to Bryan and EJI for battling for these kids and getting laws changed for future generations.

Part 3: Our broken system and women Part 4: Our broken system and racism

Just Mercy – Part 3

Our Broken System & Women

This is a continuation of my thoughts about the book and movie, Just Mercy. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to read Part 1 first.

There is only one case referenced in the book that is specific to women. But there are some sad statistics and information that I felt it was necessary to share. It is important to state that women of color or poor women are most likely to fall victim to our broken system.

Marsha and her husband Glen were a poor family full of love. They were living in a rural town in Alabama when Marsha, age forty-three and already a mother of six children, found out she was pregnant with her seventh child. She didn’t have the money to see a doctor. She went into extremely early labor in the bathtub and gave birth to a still born son. She tried to revive him but had no success. A neighbor noticed Marsha was no longer pregnant, nor had a new baby. She got the police involved. Marsha was arrested for capital murder. They convicted her of murder and she was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole and was headed to Julia Tutweiler Prison for Women.

“Women at Tutweiler were being raped, sexually harassed, exploited, and abused by male prison guards in countless ways. The male warden allowed the male guards entry into the showers during prison counts. Officers leered at the naked women and made crude comments and suggestive threats. Women had no privacy in the bathrooms, where male officers could watch them use the toilet. There were dark corners and hallways – terrifying spaces at Tutwiler where women could be beaten or sexually assaulted. EJI had asked the Department of Corrections to install security cameras in the dorms, but they refused. The culture of sexual violence was so pervasive that even the prison chaplain was sexually assaulting women when they came to the chapel.

…We started an investigation for which we interviewed over fifty women; we were truly shocked to see how widespread the problem of sexual violence had become. Several women had been raped and become pregnant. Even when DNA testing confirmed that male officers were the fathers of these children, very little was done about it. Sometimes, officers were temporarily reassigned to other duties or other prisons, only to wind up back at Tutwiler, where they continued to prey on inmates.”

EJI eventually filed a complaint with the US Department of Justice and released several public reports. Tutwiler made it onto the list of the top 10 worst prisons in America. Policy changes followed and male guards are now banned from showers areas and toilets and new wardens have taken over.

EJI took Marhsa’s cases to the supreme court and won a new trial. Finally in late 2012, Marsha’s conviction was overturned. She spent 10 years wrongfully imprisoned.

“In the United States, the number of women sent to prison increased 646 percent between 1980 and 2010. With close to two hundred thousand women in jails and prisons in American and over a million women under supervision or control of the crime justice system, the incarceration of women has reached record levels.

Most incarcerated women – nearly two-thirds – are in prison for nonviolent, low-level drug crimes or property crimes. Drug laws in particular have had a huge impact on the number of women sent to prison; so have “three strikes” laws, which seriously increase sentences for people who have previous convictions.“

When Marsha was arrested, there were five women on Alabama’s death row. All of them were condemned for unexplained deaths of their young children or the deaths of abusive spouses or boyfriends. Nationwide, most women on death row are due to a family crime involving alleged child abuse or domestic violence.

“The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental illness. But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women – particularly poor women in difficult circumstances – whose children die unexpectedly. In a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world, the inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and postpartum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. The criminalization of infant mortality and the prosecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness.

…Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest – children who have become more vulnerable and at risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home.

In 1996, Congress passed legislation that needlessly included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. This misguided law greatly affects the lives of formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of “untouchables” in American, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and children.“

Once again, many of these female criminals need our help not our condemnation. Many times children are deeply effected by how their mom is treated through this process. I am not saying criminals should not be prosecuted, but need to do better. We need to treat mental illness and we need to help women who are the victim of domestic abuse.

Part 2: Our broken system and children Part 4: Our broken system and racism

Just Mercy – Part 4

Our Broken System & Racism and Mass Incarceration

This is a continuation of my thoughts about the book and movie, Just Mercy. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to read Part 1 first.

Obviously there have been some issues of racism in the first 2 parts of my posts. I wanted to finish this up by hitting more on the racism aspect of our failed system.

“Consider the Supreme Court case of McCleskey v. Kemp, which presented convincing empirical evidence that the race of the victim is the great predictor of who gets the death penalty in the United States. The study conducted for that case revealed that offenders in Georgia were eleven times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim was white than if the victim was black. These findings were identical in ever other state where studies about race and the death penalty took place. In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were for crimes against victims who were white. Black defendant and white victim pairings increased the likelihood of a death sentence even more.“

Towards the end of his book, Bryan says that he was able to launch a race and poverty initiative. He wanted to start a project to change the way we talk about racial history and how it affects today’s race issues. He said that “so much of our worst thinking about justice is steeped in the myths of racial indifference.” He goes on to say that he believes there are four institutions in American History that have shaped our approach to race and justice and that remain poorly understood.

The first and most obvious is slavery.

The second is the reign of terror against people of color that followed the collapse of Reconstruction through World War II.

“Older people of color in the South would occasionally come up to me after speeches to complain about how antagonized they feel when they hear news commentators talking about how 9/11 was the first act of domestic terrorism in America. The racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty. America’s embrace of speedy execution was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violence of lynchings while assuring white Southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.

Another practice that is now well known to most Americans is convict leasing. Convict leasing was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to criminalize former enslaved people and convict them of nonsensical offenses so that freed men, women and children could be “leased” to businesses and effectively forced back into slave labor. Private industries throughout the country made millions of dollars with free convict labor, while thousands of African Americans died in horrific work conditions.

Racial terror and the constant threat created by violently enforcing racial hierarchy were profoundly traumatizing for African Americans, creating all kinds of psycho social distortions and difficulties that still manifest themselves today.“

A third institution are Jim Crow laws which legalized racial segregation and suppression of basic rights that defined America from 1876 to 1965.

“It seems to me that we’ve been quick to celebrate the achievements of the civil rights movement and slow to recognize the lasting damage of marginalization and subordination done in that era.“

Bryan told a story of a Midwest judge that walked into a court room and assumed he was a client simply because he was black. He laughed it off to not disadvantage his client by speaking up but was disheartened saying…

“Of course innocent mistakes occur, but constantly being underestimated, suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice.“

The fourth institution Bryan wrote about is mass incarceration.

“Going into any prison is deeply confusing if you know anything about the racial demographics of America. The extreme overrepresentation and disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, the targeted prosecution of drug crimes in poor communities, the criminalization of new immigrants and undocumented people, the political consequences of disenfranchising black voters – essentially, denying black people the right to vote, and the barriers to reentering the world after incarceration can only be fully understood through the lens of racial history.”

So that sums up what I learned from one of most impactful and heartbreaking books I’ve ever read. I wish I had the answers. I wish I had the power and influence. The overhaul that our systems need seems so insurmountable. I hope reading this makes an impression and affects a change in your heart. That is what reading the book did for me.

Part 2: Our broken system and children Part 3: Our broken system and women