In debates about the death penalty, I had started arguing that we would never think it was humane to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would.
I couldn’t pretend that his struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been hurt – and have hurt others – are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us.
Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people 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.
Sometimes I forget how we all need mitigation at some point.
I didn’t deserve reconciliation or love in that moment, but that’s how mercy works. The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving.
You’ve got to beat the drum for justice.
I was around all these murderers, and yet it felt like sometimes they were the only ones trying to help me.
But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.
In 1955, there was one psychiatric bed for every three hundred Americans;.
Ian spent eighteen years in uninterrupted solitary confinement.
Together, we hoped.
I do what I do because I’m broken, too.
Michael smiled and replied, “Well, actually, I’m a Nittany Lion.
Many states were using drugs that had been banned for animal euthanasia because they caused a painful and torturous death. The drugs weren’t readily available in the United States, and so states had started importing them from European manufacturers. When the news spread that the drugs were being used in executions in the United States, European producers stopped making them available.
There are more than a half-million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses today, up from just 41,000 in 1980.
Adding insult to injury, Tate went on to be re-elected sheriff, and he remains in office today; he has been sheriff continuously for more than twenty-five years.
The privatization of prison health care, prison commerce, and a range of services has made mass incarceration a money-making windfall for a few and a costly nightmare for the rest of us.
It wasn’t until 1967 that the United States Supreme Court finally struck down anti-miscegenation statutes.
I got that scar in Greene County, Alabama, trying to register to vote in 1964.
They were acts of terror more than anything else, inspiring fear that any encounter with a white person, any interracial social misstep, any unintended slight, any ill-advised look or comment could trigger a gruesome and lethal response.