American - Lawyer | -
I had gone to law school thinking that I would do something in the service of black people.
James Forman, Jr.
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In court, judges tell people that their conviction carries a sentence of years, or probation. The truth is far more terrible. People convicted of crimes often become social outcasts for life, finding it difficult or impossible to rent an apartment, get a job, adopt children, access public benefits, serve on juries, or vote.
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Mass incarceration will have to be dismantled the same way it was constructed: piecemeal, incrementally and, above all, locally.
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While mass incarceration is a national crisis, it was built locally.
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Mass incarceration and its never-ending human toll will be with us until we come to see that no crime justifies permanent civic death.
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There can be racism in a system even if a particular episode of injustice is not a manifestation of that racism. Every single thing in the criminal justice system is not a manifestation of racism, but many things are.
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Our system never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.
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The fundamental problem for the teaching profession is how undervalued it is and how underpaid teachers are.
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A black man of my generation born in the late 1960s is more than twice as likely to go to prison in his lifetime then a black man of my father's generation. I was born after the Voting Rights Act, after the Civil Rights Act, after the Fair Housing Act.
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African-Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals. Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.
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What if we strove for compassion, for mercy, for forgiveness? And what if we did this for everybody, including people who have harmed others?
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One consequence of racism and segregation is that many American whites know little or nothing about the daily lives of African Americans. Black America's least-understood communities are those poor, hyper-segregated places we once called ghettos. These neighborhoods are not far away, but they might as well be on the moon.
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