This week I read "Just Mercy" by Bryan Stevenson. This book is Bryan's account of his astounding legal career in the fight against the death penalty, life in prison sentences, the unfair trial history of Black men and women in the US, and the racist judicial system created hundreds of years ago that continues to evolve and stand today. Within its pages, he movingly tells stories of the many children condemned to live out their days in prison (50+ years). He recounts horrifying miscarriages of justice where white law enforcement tunnel vision their way to wrongful convictions. And more than that, he advocates for mercy and reform, with the notion that redemption is possible and that justice and mercy are not exclusive or incompatible ideas.
When I read stories like Bryan's, I feel woefully inadequate in my own life. I imagine what sort of spirit lies within a man like this, that he spurs himself onward to fight tirelessly for good. I wonder what gifts he has been given that ideas become reality in such tangible ways. I know within me I have a deep desire and a flood of inspiration for change, and yet for some reason I have never been able to bring these ideas to fruition. If only all people with desire and inspiration could be equipped to action I wonder how marvellous our world would be.
Bryan's legal legacy feels very much like the story of the boy walking down a beach ladened with starfish that have been washed up in the tide. He picks up one sand-covered starfish and lays it back in the water. Over and over he returns the starfish to the ocean. A wondering bystander asks "There are thousands of starfish on this beach. You can never return them all. Why even bother? What difference does it make?" The boy looks up and replies "Well, it makes a difference to this one." Bryan's work did have some sweeping legal effects, like eliminating death sentences and life in prison sentences for children. But mostly his work was about one case at a time, one person at a time. At one point, he writes that he and his organization helped free over 100 prisoners. That number seems dishearteningly low, and yet, what a difference it made to each of those 100 people.
Mass incarceration is a terrible legacy of racist attitudes. When slavery was abolished and the Jim Crow laws struck down, white people very "nobly" said to Black people "You are free! Go be what we are!" and walked away with the false notion that everyone was now equal. But decades of oppression do not disappear overnight. The inability to get fair loans and mortgages, the prejudiced practices in job hiring, and 200 years behind in wealth and power accumulation meant the playing field was never equal. The undeniable and heartbreaking ties of poverty to drug use and crime mean that we have very, very, very far to go to undo 400 years of oppression.
In the author's own words:
"We've institutionalized policies that reduce people to their worst acts and permanently label them "criminal," "murderer," "rapist," "thief," "drug dealer," "sex offender," "felon," - identities they cannot change regardless of the circumstances of their crimes or any improvements they might make in their lives."
"We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity."
"I began thinking about what would happen if we all just acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses, our deficits, our biases, our fears. Make if we did, we wouldn't want to kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected, and the traumatized. I had a notion that if we acknowledged our brokenness, we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable."
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