Re-Visioning Justice

Photo taken from Re-Visioning Justice Facebook Page

By: Mick Jacobs

Two weeks ago, our director Lauren traveled to Nashville, Tennessee to take part in the Re-Visioning Justice conference, immersing herself in an education of the injustices that occur every day in these United States. 

Anyone who follows recent events surrounding victims like Trayvon Martin and movements including #blacklivesmatter understands there are many flaws that permeate our criminal justice systems.  What Lauren did not expect was the sheer scale of crimes committed by our justice system, nothing less than human rights abuses, and the little to no exposure it receives in the media.  We wish to detail to our viewers some of the most poignant facts she took away from this conference: some left us baffled, some left us teary eyed, but all of them left us angry and incited for action.

Following this blog post will be 2 more.

            1) will be a sharing of more of the speakers and a list of resources for further education,    followed by

            2) solutions-based information.

            
BryanStevenson, a leading voice on mass incarceration, states that one must be broken first, like those the system has broken, to eventually rise up with conviction in the pursuit of justice. Imagine people like you and me behind all these statistics below:

1.      70 million citizens possess criminal arrests on their record, with 10,000-12,000 added every day.  By these standards, it would seem the United States considers almost a third of the population to be criminals.

2.      Speaking of population, America contains only 5% of the world’s people, yet we also comprise 25% of the world’s incarcerated populace.

3.      Of those 25%, 3,000 of them are children, sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole. 

4.      The US is also the only country that places its youth in solitary confinement, a process everyone knows can destroy a full-grown man, physically and mentally.

5.      If you have a mental disability, the chances of you receiving a bed are less than .01%.  Combined with Reagan-era cuts in spending for mental health patients and research, we have created a homeless population where 47% of homeless women suffer from a form of major depression.

6.      Instead of your taxes going towards assisting mental health, they’re going to prisons.  Federal spending on prison systems costs over 6 billion dollars a year, up from just 970 million in 1980.

7.      84% of women are incarcerated for non-violent crime, rather, they get locked up for employing survival strategies, such as prostitution or defending themselves from abusive relationships.  And the abuse is inescapable, with 92% of female prisoners in California reporting forms of “battery & abuse” within the Golden State’s prison system.

8.      Victims of wrongful incarceration, like Ndume Olatushani, reminded us of how these faults in our system affect us on a personal level.  A Times article notes 4% of inmates have been wrongfully convicted, a seemingly small number, until you consider the gravitas of Olatushani’s testimony about how that small percentage shattered his life.

As a system designed to rehabilitate its charges, the American prison scheme seems more at home keeping us damaged & derailed rather than actually trying to create a more positive society.  The more we allow this treatment to occur, the more we allow the cycle to perpetuate.

            
“Trauma that is not transformed ends up being transferred.” –Howard Zehr, "grandfather of restorative justice."