The next "Dying to Stay Here" podcast will feature a panel discussing what we call our criminal justice system. The panel reflected on a recent election in California, where voters were asked, in plain language, whether they wanted to remove slavery from our constitution, where it's still allowed "as punishment for a crime," and voted to keep it. As we celebrate another Black History Month, I reflect on the disproportionate number of Black people behind bars.
After her partner was sentenced to 22 years in jail at age 17, Harris experienced life as a young Black mother fighting to keep her family intact while navigating the justice system. "The first five years were the most difficult for him because he felt his life was over," she said. "Twenty-two years ... when you are a teenager sounds like a lifetime."
In a penal system that legalises slavery, who is the real criminal? That question lies at the heart of Danny Lyon's landmark 1971 monograph, Conversations with the Dead, a masterwork of New Journalism chronicling crime and punishment in the United States. After his work in the Civil Rights Movement and with the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle club , Lyon gained unprecedented access to seven penitentiaries inside the Texas Department of Corrections over 14 months in 1967-68 to create a Dostoevskyian journey into the belly of the beast.
We reject the outdated view that criminal justice is a zero-sum game that pits safety versus justice against one another. Moreover, history - and countless studies, data, and lived experiences - tells us reactive policymaking driven by politics and fear in response to a specific incident, no matter how awful, leads to poor legislation that serves neither justice nor safety.
As a young man, Seth Ferranti ran a drug-dealing operation distributing vast volumes of cannabis and LSD across college campuses in the United States. It was the 1980s and US President Ronald Reagan had proclaimed that marijuana pot, grass, whatever you want to call it is probably the most dangerous drug in the United States. I didn't believe them, says Seth Ferranti, now a documentary filmmaker and director of Tortured Mind: The Reality of Post Incarceration Syndrome.
As summer ends, masked, badgeless ICE thugs and red-state National Guard militias stalk an unnaturally quiet Washington, DC. Five years ago, the city was different. After the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, massive multiracial demonstrations filled the streets. While these protests were constant, there was one we should be remembering this week. It started downtown at the Capitol One Arena, home of the NBA's Washington Wizards and was led, bullhorn in hand, by Wizards captain John Wall.
