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Background:
The following statistics presented by practicing attorney, NYU law professor, author, public speaker, and Equal Justice Initiative director Bryan Stevenson in his Ted Talk entitled, “We Need to Talk About an Injustice” unveil the dilapidated state of the U.S. justice system:
“In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons. Today, there are 2.3 million. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.”
Regarding prisoners on death row, “one out of nine people innocent. In aviation, we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash.”
“In urban communities across this country—Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington – 50% to 60% of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole.”
The injustice transcends race.
According to Human Rights Watch, “at least half of all female prisoners have experienced some form of sexual abuse prior to incarceration,” and from data provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “69% of ‘substantiated staff-on-inmate incidents’ involved staff sexual misconduct.” This means that out of all the ‘bad interactions’—and in prison, there is no shortage of ‘bad interactions’—between female prisoners and prison staff, 69% of them involved sexual misconduct…
Age plays a role too: “Before the Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles in 2005, 366 people were executed for juvenile offenses; 70% of those 14 or younger who were sentenced to die in prison were children of color; and children as young as 13 were among those condemned to die in prison” (“Children in Adult Prison”, Equal Justice Initiative).
The data is clear: citizens who lack societal leverage experience disproportionate mistreatment by the U.S. justice system.
This essay began as an English class assignment but has since been adapted to reflect the style of writing I seek to portray on this platform. The specific research question it seeks to address is: “What concerns within the U.S. criminal justice system do modern media and literature addressing that topic bring to light?”
That task is addressed by synthesizing themes and specific evidence from various individual works of literature focused on criminal justice reform to make an insightful commentary on the topic as a whole.
While references to specific literature and media are briefly described within the text, a comprehensive understanding of them would better equip any reader to more thoroughly absorb and interact with the ideas and arguments expressed herein.
Bryan Stevenson wrote his now extensively acclaimed novel entitled Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption in 2014. Stevenson graduated from Harvard Law and soon after founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit law office focused on providing legal services to our country’s most embattled citizens, free of charge. In addition to authoring Just Mercy, Stevenson continues to direct the EJI while managing an expansive docket of cases, teaches a class at NYU Law, and speaks regularly at various public events.
His views regarding criminal justice reform laid the groundwork for this essay, and therefore, I’d recommend reading the following book summary of Just Mercy to grasp Mr. Stevenson’s principle ideas and perspectives. Similarly, the EJI website contains a concise mission statement in addition to elaborations on their various justice-centered projects which can provide more detailed information on the work being done in alignment with Mr. Stevenson’s views.
When They See Us is a Netflix series directed by Ava DuVernay depicting the tragic saga of injustice that imprisoned five young boys wrongfully implicated in the “Central Park Five” gang rape case of 1989. The series takes the point of view of the now “Exonerated Five” to expose how systemic power imbalances sowed the seeds for a corrupt investigation and prosecution of five innocent boys. Antron McCray was one of the five wrongfully incarcerated teenage boys who endured intense police questioning in the show. He’s referenced by name in this essay. Read a briefing on the factual history of the “Central Park Five” case here.
The essay also references the film adaptation of Stevenson’s Just Mercy book directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, which has also received critical acclaim both in the movie industry and amongst civil rights and social justice advocates. As far as the storyline goes, there isn’t anything super notable that deviates from Walter McMillian’s story as portrayed by Stevenson in his Just Mercy book.
Lastly, factual elaboration on many of the data points and individual narratives of injustice referenced can be found by consulting the Equal Justice Initiative’s website (linked above) and simply searching for the names of individuals.
IMPORTANT UPDATE: My comprehensive analysis of our country’s immigration system and the related scuffles currently playing out in the political arena is still actively under work. It should be finalized sometime within the upcoming weeks. It’s going to be a longer—but, in my opinion, critically important—read.
Opinion:
Introduction:
Today—according to the Equal Justice Initiative’s “Criminal Justice Reform” webpage—the U.S. contains only 5% of the world’s population, yet an astounding 25% of its incarcerated population.
Over 2.2 million Americans are currently serving prison sentences.
As of 2023, cumulative spending on state and federal prisons is almost $200 billion per year, so justifiably many are asking, “What are we getting for our money?”
In the opinion of many criminal justice scholars and reform advocates—a whole lot of injustice. They argue that such injustice stems from our nation’s reprehensible history of systemic discrimination based primarily on race, but also other factors including wealth, gender, mental capacity, and personal ideology.
Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has even dedicated mass incarceration as the fourth primary institution defining the contemporary discourse around race and injustice. The other three institutions include slavery, racial terror (think the Ku Klux Klan during the late 1800s), and the Jim Crow statutes that legalized racial segregation.
Today’s justice system is ridden with many conspicuous flaws in need of reform; however, the power imbalance between condemned individuals and authority figures, along with the abuses it facilitates, necessitates the most urgent and radical change.
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Section 1—Personal Abuse:
The power imbalance between condemned individuals and justice administrators takes two distinct forms, each with specific, yet equally devastating effects. Individual physical abuse is the more overt and commonly discussed of the two.
Toward the beginning of the Just Mercy film, Bryan Stevenson—who’s still in law school and interning with the Southern Prisoner’s Defense Committee—meets with his first death row inmate, 24-year-old Henry Davis.
After an inspiring conversation between the two that surpasses their allotted meeting time, the prison guard charges into the room, seizes Henry from his chair next to Stevenson, slams him against the wall, and aggressively handcuffs him, despite Henry’s lack of resistance. Stevenson protests, “Hey! Stop that! He didn’t do anything!” but to no avail, and he’s forced to watch helplessly as the guard forces Henry back to his cell. Stevenson sits motionless, frozen in horror at his new friend’s unjustified, barbaric treatment (Cretton).
This scene dismantles any notion that the U.S. justice system serves a rehabilitating role for condemned citizens.
The conversation between Stevenson and Henry in which they blissfully reminisced on shared childhood experiences was true rehabilitation. In light of the justice system’s persistent attempts to label him a savage forever incapable of participating in civil society, Henry felt reinvigorated with humanity while conversing with Stevenson. This is immensely rehabilitating.
However, the guard’s hostility in response to Henry’s peacefulness discourages future efforts by Henry to remain civil in belligerent situations, instead diverting him down a path of violence, resentment, and combativeness. Henry can’t ‘buy into the system’ to achieve rehabilitation because the system itself is debilitating.
In the same vein, Marsha Colbey was a severely impoverished, trailer-dwelling mother of six who found herself facing a capital murder charge following the stillborn birth of her seventh child. She, like Henry Davis, experienced comparable instances of counter-rehabilitory abuse while serving time in the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, one of the worst-managed female prisons in the country.
Stevenson writes the following about the discussions he had with Colbey as her attorney during their visits: “She would talk about her case…and a range of other problems. But it was the sexual violence at Tutwiler that most frequently came up during these visits” (Stevenson 239).
Stevenson further elaborates that rape and even impregnation by male prison staff against inmates is the most pervasive issue plaguing the U.S. female prison system today.
Such cold-hearted, disgusting injustice against the most distraught and defenseless women in our country is explicitly enabled by the vast power imbalance between condemned individuals and legal authorities, a feature baked into our criminal justice system's very fabric. These women do not stay silent, yet due to their labeling by the system and society as ‘lesser beings,’ their cries fall on deaf ears, and the injustice perpetuates.
In summary, authoritative figures within the U.S. criminal justice system abuse their power in despicable ways to the detriment of our society’s most broken individuals. This renders the system a breeding ground for poverty, violence, mental illness, and lawlessness, exposing its blatantly faux adherence to ‘rehabilitation.’
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Section 2—Systemic Exploitation:
The second manifestation of the power imbalance in the U.S. justice system is more covert, yet arguably more pervasive.
Beyond individual cases of personal abuse, the power imbalance enables authorities to exploit the system using their predisposed leverage to imprison citizens nearly at will.
The Netflix series When They See Us, directed by Ava DuVernay, explores the deliberate injustice committed by the NYPD against five innocent teenage boys in the “Central Park Five” gang rape case.
What Antron McCray’s father advises him amidst harsh interrogation from desperate and ruthless NYPD detectives epitomizes this systemic exploitation of power: “Look…when the police want what they want, they will do anything. They’ll lie on us. They will lock us up. They will kill us. You will do what they say. You will go along. Do you understand me?” (DuVernay).
Evidently, Antron’s father has a personal history with police harassment, as do—according to a study entitled “Equity in America” by Tufts University—42% of African American U.S. citizens. He’s been conditioned to comply with police’s demands no matter the circumstances out of an existential fear of wrongful imprisonment due to his race, or even worse, death by police violence on the same charge.
The NYPD was able to extract a fabricated confession from Antron following his consultation with his father, which aided in the eventual incarceration of all five boys. All but two of the boys were complete strangers to one another, and all were completely innocent. Not all cases receive comparable levels of publicity to the “Central Park Five” case; however, weaponizing authority to obtain desirable false statements is a somewhat common practice employed by law enforcement officials to maintain their images as competent defenders of public safety.
This was exactly the case concerning Walter McMillian’s wrongful incarceration.
Ralph Myers was an illiterate former foster child with an exhaustive criminal history who was currently being detained on separate murder charges when the state of Alabama made him their primary witness against McMillian.
In his book Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson writes that Myers had been “promised he wouldn’t receive the death penalty” and would enjoy “favorable treatment in exchange for his testimony” if he conspired with law enforcement against McMillian (Stevenson 52).
Upon Myers’s attempted recantation of said testimony, Stevenson says that local police “decided to pressure Myers to produce more incriminating details,” and that when “Myers protested that he didn’t have more incriminating details because the story wasn’t true,” they placed Myers on death row before his trial in an “unprecedented maneuver that proved very effective” (Stevenson 52).
Bill Hooks was the state’s secondary witness.
Hooks was also jailed on charges separate from the Morrison murder when he was offered immediate release and a cash payment in exchange for falsely testifying that he saw Walter’s truck leaving the site of Ronda Morrison’s murder. Bill Hooks agreed to testify.
How, one may ask, was Walter McMillian placed on death row using not one but two blatantly false testimonies? The answer: leverage, and it’s eviscerating our system of its competence and legitimacy from the inside out.
Leverage fosters the self-perpetuating cycle of wrongful incarceration based on fake testimonies from other—sometimes illegitimately—imprisoned individuals, which in turn makes the U.S. justice system’s wrongful incarceration rate the highest amongst any country in the world. Law enforcement officials and prosecutors can imprison any innocent individual almost at will if it serves their needs to do so, a potent threat to the U.S. justice system's legitimacy.
The power imbalance enables officials to exploit and corrupt the incarcerated and accused into complying with their every demand; it’s the nexus of nearly every shortcoming associated with the system, rotting it through to its core. In essence, those guilty of the true crimes are those who run the U.S. prison system.
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Conclusion:
In conclusion, despite the many deficiencies causing the U.S. justice system to fail in its principal objective, administering justice, one stands above all. The poisonous power imbalance between authority figures and accused or incarcerated individuals drives the perpetual injustice within our justice system. It manifests in both the physical abuse of individual detainees and the abuse of the system itself in condemning innocent people for personal gain under the ruse of defending public safety.
Circling back to Stevenson’s discussion of the four institutions shaping today’s discourse surrounding race and injustice, the question remains: is our citizenry compassionate and driven enough to reform the U.S. justice system to the point that discussions of race and injustice invoke it solely as a matter of historical analysis, as is—mostly—the case today with slavery, racial terror, and legalized segregation? Can we render the systemic abuse of power against our most embattled citizens a disgraced practice of the past? Or will we largely remain bystanders, exhibiting an ignorant indifference to issues that don’t directly implicate ourselves?
Unfortunately, an answer is far from imminent, and only the future will tell.
Citations:
Cretton, Destin Daniel, director. Just Mercy.
DuVernay, Ava, director. "Part One." When They See Us, season 1, episode 1, Netflix.
Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Spiegel & Grau, 2014.
Two-thirds of African Americans know someone mistreated by police, and 22% report mistreatment in past year. Tufts University | Equity in America Research, equityresearch.tufts.edu/two-thirds-of-african-americans-know-someone-mistreated-by-police-and-22-report-mistreatment-in-past-year/.
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