We need more hope. We need more mercy. And we need more justice.
But if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.
You can’t effectively fight abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression, or injustice and not be broken by it. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if your brokenness is not equivalent.
More people have asked me what they can do to help me in the last fourteen hours of my life than ever asked me in the years when I was coming up.
In Alabama, even though 65 percent of all homicide victims were black, nearly 80 percent of the people on death row were there for crimes against victims who were white.
We are all implicated when we allow others to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, an entire nation. Fear and anger can make us cruel and abusive. We all suffer from the absence of mercy and we harm ourselves as much as we victimize others.
Listen, I did something I probably wasn’t supposed to do, but I want you to know about it. On the trip back down here after court on that last day – well, I know how Avery is, you know. Well anyway, I just want you to know that I took an exit off the interstate on the way back. And, well, I took him to a Wendy’s, and I bought him a chocolate milkshake.
In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise.
Love is the motive, but justice is the instrument. – REINHOLD NIEBUHR.
Walter told me that it was working from morning until night, being outdoors, that made him feel normal again. Then one afternoon, tragedy struck. He was cutting a tree when a branch dislodged and struck him, breaking his neck. It was a serious injury that left Walter in very poor condition for several weeks. He didn’t have a lot of care available, so he came to live with me in Montgomery for several months until he recovered.
The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent –.
It wasn’t likely that we could do much for many of the people who needed help, but it made the journey home less sad to hope that maybe we could.
Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days.
We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt.
The death penalty can be imposed fairly only after carefully considering all the reasons why death might not be the appropriate sentence.
This book is about getting closer to mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America. It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us. It’s also about a dramatic period in our recent history, a period that indelibly marked the lives of millions of Americans – of all races, ages, and sexes – and the American psyche as a whole.
American prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. Mass incarceration has been largely ruled by misguided drug policy and excessive sentencing, but the internment of hundreds of thousands of poor and mentally ill people has been a driving force in achieving our record levels of imprisonment.
Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different.
I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.
Make me to hear joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.” I.