Kimberly > Recent Status Updates

This book is bad. So bad. A non lawyer representing a client in a murder trial? DNA evidence obtained from a medical database without consent or a warrant? Non-disclosure of evidence and witnesses by the prosecution? Did the author bother to do any research into how criminal law works? And don’t even get me started on the fake Indigenous tribe. So bad.

“White America must recognize that justice for black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. The comfortable, the entrenched, the privileged cannot continue to tremble at the prospect of change in the status quo.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

We should not hope for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous that sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous that sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity-Martin Luther King, Jr.

More African American adults are under correctional control today-in prison or in jail, on probation or parole-than were enslaved in 1850.

As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.

It is important to keep in mind that many rappers and hip hop artists do not aim to glorify or romanticize gangsta life or culture. They are simply telling the truth about their experience, in their own way, in their own voice.

The worst of gangsta rap and blaxploitation (such as VH1’s Flavor of Love) is a modern-day minstrel Is a for-profit display of the worst racial stereotypes and images associated with the era of mass incarceration- where black people are criminalized and portrayed as out of control, shameless, violent, oversexed, and generally undeserving.

For those black youth who are constantly followed by the police and shamed by teachers, relatives, and strangers, embracing the stigma of criminality is an act of rebellion-an attempt to carve out a positive identity in a society that offers them little ore than scorn, contempt, and constant surveillance.

Poor people of color, like other Americans, want safe streets, peaceful communities, healthy families, good jobs, and meaningful opportunities to contribute to society. The notion that families struggling in ghetto neighborhoods do not want those things, and are instead perfectly content to live in crime-ridden communities feeling no shame or regret, is, quite simply, racist.

A study found that nearly a quarter of guests in homeless shelters had been incarcerated within the previous year-people who were unable to find somewhere to live after release from prison.

Today a criminal freed from prison has scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a freed slave or a black person living “free” in Mississippi at the height of Jim Crow. A criminal record today authorizes precisely the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind-discrimination in employment, housing, education, public benefits, jury service, and even the right to vote.

A review of juvenile sentencing reports found that prosecutors routinely described black and white youth differently. Blacks committed crimes because of internal personality flaws such as disrespect. Whites did so because of external conditions such as family conflict.

Though it is not widely known, the prosecutor is the most powerful law enforcement officer in the criminal justice system. It is the prosecutor that holds the keys to the jailhouse door.

Justice Thurgood Marshall felt compelled to remind his colleagues that there is, in fact, “ no drug exception” written into the text of the Constitution.

Those who have been swept within the criminal justice system know that the way the system actually works bears little resemblance to what happens on television or in movies.

The made-for-TV version of the criminal justice system perpetuates the myth that the primary function of the system is to keep our streets safe and our homes secure by rooting out dangerous criminals and punishing them. They are the modern-day equivalent of the old movies that portray happy slaves, the fictional gloss placed on a brutal system of racialized oppression and control.

Liberals, by contrast, insisted that social reforms such as the War on Poverty and civil rights legislation would get at the “root causes” of criminal behavior and stressed the social conditions that predictably generate crime.

Liberals, by contrast, insisted that social reforms such as the War on Poverty and civil rights legislation would get at the “root causes” of criminal behavior and stressed the social conditions that predictably generate crime.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, two schools of thought were offered to the general public regarding race, poverty, and the social order. Conservatives argued that poverty was caused not by structural factors related to race and class but rather by culture-particularly black culture.

“ John Ehrlichmqn, special counsels to the president, explained the Nixon administration’s campaign strategy of 1968 in this way ‘We’ll go after the racists..’”

The fact that some African Americans have experienced great success in recent years does not mean that something akin to a racial caste system no longer exists. There have always been black success stories, even during slavery and Jim Crow.

In fact, the very discourse of color blindness-created by neoconservatives and neoliberals in order to trivialize and disguise the depths of black suffering in the 1980s and ‘90s- has left America blind to the New Jim Crow.

Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.

“ They are legally denied the ability to obtain employment, housing, and public benefits-much as African Americans were once forced into a segregated, second-class citizenship in the Jim Crow era.

“Once [incarcerated people] have been released, they are often denied the right to vote, excluded from juries, and relegated to racially segregated and subordinated existence.” “...they are confined to the margins of mainstream society and denied access to the mainstream economy.”