40 reasons why our jails are full of Black and Poor people

[mountain grammy]

29. From the article.. sums it up nicely.

What does it say about our society that it uses its jails and prisons as the primary detention facilities for poor and black and brown people who have been racially targeted and jail them with the mentally ill and chemically dependent? The current criminal system has dozens of moving parts from the legislators who create the laws, to the police who enforce them, to the courts which apply them, to the jails and prison which house the people caught up in the system, to the public and business community who decides whom to hire, to all of us who either do something or turn our heads away. These are our brothers and sisters and cousins and friends of our coworkers. There are lots of proposed solutions. To learn more about the problems and the solutions are go to places like The Sentencing Project, the Vera Institute, or the Center for American Progress. Because it's the right thing to do, and because about 95 percent of the people who we send to prison are coming back into our communities.

The American justice system has been mostly unjust since the beginning. The Supreme Court has upheld, at one time or another, slavery, segregation, and police overreach and brutality. State executions took the place of terror lynchings and incarceration became a substitute for segregation.

Once a person gets involved in the justice system, it's hard to get your life back, especially true for minorities. If police and prosecutors want to get a citizen for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, they will usually succeed. The stories of wrongful prosecution are frightening. It seems every day, an American citizen is finally exonerated after spending years, sometimes close to a lifetime, in prison. For every one released, you have to wonder how many more are rotting in prison.