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
Thoughts of Bridget 