Guest: Criminal-justice system in desperate need of reform
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of fighting until “justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Some thought that the election of the first black president might signal that that day had finally come. But look at what’s happening at the other end of the civil-rights spectrum — in our prisons and jails. Elected officials posturing as “tough on crime” have turned vast swaths of America into 1958 Alabama.
Affluent white communities are largely unaffected. But the war on crime has had devastating effects in communities of color, creating a generation of convicted felons without job skills or basic rights and imposing a growing powerlessness at the ballot box: Three in 10 black men will lose the right to vote at some point in their lives.
Some argue that arrest and incarceration figures are grossly disproportionate because poor, minority communities have more crime. But look at the facts: White Americans use drugs at the same rate as minority Americans, according to the 2003 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Nonetheless, three-quarters of those incarcerated on drug charges are black or Latino, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Today, in most of America, thousands of moving pieces come together in a three-step process that takes young African-American or Latino men into the criminal-justice system and then pushes them out the other end years later, quite literally as second-class citizens.
First, they’re harvested by law-enforcement agencies that focus extraordinary firepower on minority communities and public schools, going out of their way to cast as broad of a net as possible and maximizing the chance that even a minor encounter will do lasting damage.
Second, they’re warehoused in inhumane prison conditions designed not so much to rehabilitate as to humiliate.
And third, they’re released back into the same hard neighborhoods that failed them before. Only now, they’re not only poor and poorly educated, they’re powerless, as well — and effectively segregated from mainstream America.
I’m not arguing that the system is explicitly designed to push minorities back into pre-civil-rights status. But if it had been, it could hardly be more effective.
For all the progress we’ve made, maybe what John Lewis said in 1963 remains true: “This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their career on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.”
Changes to the justice system alone will not stop this march toward a new American apartheid. But there are things that we can and should do now, actions for which the American Civil Liberties Union is a strong advocate.
We need to end the war on minority communities that the so-called war on drugs has become. We must eliminate marijuana as an entry into the criminal-justice system — no one should do time or become a felon for a crime that the last three presidents have committed. And we need to eliminate the grotesque sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine.
We need to fully fund both the federal Legal Services Corporation and local indigent defense offices. In some parts of the country, roughly half of those qualified to receive legal assistance are unable to obtain it.
And we need to limit post-prison burdens such as restitution and fines that become a permanent and often insurmountable barrier to progress and re-integration into civil society.
Anthony Romero is the national executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. This is an edited excerpt of the speech he recently delivered at the ACLU’s 75th anniversary dinner in Iowa City.
comments powered by Disqus
