Why do we want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we think a thing like that can be right?
Florida had the largest population in the world of children condemned to die in prison for non-homicides.
South during the Civil Rights Era. It was during this time that the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was added as a holiday in Alabama. Even today, banks, state offices, and state institutions shut down in his honor.
My short time on death row revealed that there was something missing in the way we treat people in our judicial system, that maybe we judge some people unfairly. The more I reflected on the experience, the more I recognized that I had been struggling my whole life with the question of how and why people are judged unfairly.
We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our.
In the United States, the number of women sent to prison increased 646 percent between 1980 and 2010, a rate of increase 1.5 times higher than the rate for men. With close to two hundred thousand women in jails and prisons in America and over a million women under the supervision or control of the criminal justice system, the incarceration of women has reached record levels.
One of the country’s least-discussed postwar problems is how frequently combat veterans bring the traumas of war back with them and are incarcerated after returning to their communities.
The black people around me were strong and determined but marginalized and excluded.
We have created a new caste system that forces thousands of people into homelessness, bans them from living with their families and in their communities, and renders them virtually unemployable. Some states permanently strip people with criminal convictions of the right to vote; as a result, in several Southern states disenfranchisement among African American men has reached levels unseen since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Proximity has taught me some basic and humbling truths, including this vital lesson: Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. My work with the poor and incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.
This book is about getting closer to mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America. It is about how easily we condemn people in his country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us.
Beat the drum for justice.
In poor urban neighborhoods across the United States, black and brown boys routinely have multiple encounters with the police. Even though many of these children have done nothing wrong, they are targeted by police, presumed guilty, and suspected by law enforcement of being dangerous or engaged in criminal activity.
We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation.
Alabama had more juveniles sentenced to death per capita than any other state – or any other country in the world.
We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated.
The bad things that happen to us don’t define us. It’s just important sometimes that people understand where we’re coming from.
One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison;.
We emphasized the incongruity of not allowing children to smoke, drink, vote, drive without restrictions, give blood, buy guns, and a range of other behaviors because of their well-recognized lack of maturity and judgment while simultaneously treating some of the most at-risk, neglected, and impaired children exactly the same as full-grown adults in the criminal justice system.
He was trying to acculturate himself to a world that corrupted healthy human development in every way.