The U.S. Supreme Court has eviscerated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, giving the police license to sweep communities, to conduct 'stop and frisk' operations.
I believe it is possible to bring an end to mass incarceration and birth a new moral consensus about how we ought to be responding to poor folks of color and a consensus in support of basic human rights for all. But it is going to take some work.
The Supreme Court has made it nearly impossible to prove race discrimination in the criminal justice system.
When people have been hurt over and over, and rather than compassion or understanding you're given lectures about how it's really all your fault and that no one needs to make amends, you can lose your mind.
The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.
If everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights, there would not be enough judges, lawyers, or prison cells to deal with the ensuing tsunami of litigation.
Some prison officials are determined to keep the people they lock in cages as ignorant as possible about the racial, social, and political forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation on earth. Perhaps they worry the truth might actually set the captives free.
Thousands of people plead guilty to crimes every year in the United States because they know that the odds of a jury's believing their word over a police officer's are slim to none.
Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty.
The great gift of 'Incarceration Nations' is that, by introducing a wide range of approaches to crime, punishment, and questions of justice in diverse countries - Rwanda, South Africa, Brazil, Jamaica, Uganda, Singapore, Australia and Norway - it forces us to face the reality that American-style punishment has been chosen.
Black men with criminal records are the most severely disadvantaged group in the labor market.
In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.
I am a criminal. Coming to terms with this aspect of my identity has helped me to see more clearly - with blinders off - the ways in which I have been encouraged not to feel any connection to 'them,' those labeled criminals. I see now that 'they' are me, and I am them.
If there is any hope that we in America might one day overcome our own history of genocide, slavery, discrimination, and oppression and create a justice system that is truly a source of international pride rather than shame, I suspect Rwanda may have as much to teach us about what is required as any tour of a Norwegian prison.
Felons are typically stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. They're relegated to a permanent undercaste.
Once labeled a felon, you are ushered into a parallel social universe. You can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits - forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind.
There is a system of racial and social control in communities of color across America.
We need transformational change of our criminal justice system - not just, you know, a handful of consent decrees or policy reforms.
'Slavery by Another Name' is an important book that I think all Americans should read, about how, following the end of slavery, a new system of racial and social control was born, known as 'convict leasing.'
After the end of slavery, African-American men were arrested in mass, and they were arrested for extremely minor crimes like loitering, standing around, vagrancy, or the equivalent of jaywalking - arrested and then sent to prison and then leased to plantations.
