Even though the restriction couldn’t be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it.
Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex” – the business interests that capitalize on prison construction – made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration.
Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain’t right. People are supposed to die on God’s schedule.
The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price.
I was uncertain about what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew it would have something to do with the lives of the poor, America’s history of racial inequality, and the struggle to be equitable and fair with one another. It would have something to do with the things I’d already seen in life so far and wondered about, but I couldn’t really put it together in a way that made a career path clear.
Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling – nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them.
My work has taught me a vital lesson. Each of us is more than the worse thing we’ve done. I am persuaded that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.
We’ve given up on rehabilitation, education, and services for the imprisoned because providing assistance to the incarcerated is apparently too kind and compassionate. We.
I may be old, I may be poor, I may be black, but I’m here. I’m here because I’ve got this vision of justice that compels me to be a witness. I’m here because I’m supposed to be here. I’m here because you can’t keep me away.
Private prison builders and prison service companies have spent millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences, and keep more people locked up so that they can earn more profits. Private profit has corrupted incentives to improve public safety, reduce the costs of mass incarceration, and most significantly, promote rehabilitation of the incarcerated.
His freedom was, in a small way, a sign of hope in a hopeless place.
The conscience told the tears “I know you really want me to cry But if I release you from bondage, In gaining your freedom you die.” The tears gave it some thought Before giving the conscience an answer “If crying brings you to triumph Then dying’s not such a disaster.
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. By the mid-1980s, nearly 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military. While the rate declined in the 1990s as the shadows cast by the Vietnam War began to recede, it has picked up again as a result of the military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But today, our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused even the Christians 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 stonecatchers.
There are hundreds of ways we accommodate physical disabilities – or at least understand them. We get angry when people fail to recognize the need for thoughtful and compassionate assistance when it comes to the physically disabled, but because mental disabilities aren’t visible in the same way, we tend to be dismissive of the needs of the disabled and quick to judge their deficits and failures.
The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent – strong enough to break the victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering.
These aren’t my scars, cuts, and bruises. These are my medals of honor.
So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned 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. I.
I heard you in that courtroom today. I’ve even seen you here a couple times before. I know’s you a stonecatcher, too.
I didn’t deserve reconciliation or love in that moment, but that’s how mercy works. The.