Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built …
America’s Slave Empire By Chris Hedges
Three prisoners—Melvin Ray, James Pleasant and Robert Earl Council—who led work stoppages in Alabama prisons in January 2014 as part of the Free Alabama Movementhave spent the last 18 months in solitary confinement. Authorities, unnerved by the protests that engulfed three prisons in the state, as well as by videos and pictures of abusive conditions smuggled out by the movement, say …
Can We Reduce Bias in Criminal Justice? – Jason Marsh
This article is the first in a series exploring the effects that unconscious racial biases have on the criminal justice system in the United States. While this article reports on evidence of those biases, subsequent essays will propose ways to mitigate their effects. Long before Officer Darren Wilson fired the shots that killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, questions of …
US jails are warehouses of sick, poor and low-risk people
Jail is not supposed to be where you put the mentally ill or those too poor to pay bail. Nor is it supposed to be where African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans and Asians go for crimes that don’t land white people behind bars. But that is what they are increasingly becoming. The primary purpose of jails, unlike prisons, is to …