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