Just Mercy

Just Mercy explains why the United States judicial system is so broken, including how its bias toward women, Blacks, minorities, and others makes communities and the entire country a worse place and what author Bryan Stevenson is doing with his Equal Justice Initiative to try to stop these injustices.

Unfortunately, since the 1980s, the American criminal justice system has been rampant with excessive punishment. This is when US courts started giving extreme sentences even for minor offenses. If you had any kind of criminal behavior on your record, no matter how small, it was even worse. This meant even a small crime could give you a life sentence.

The result? In the 1980s, at any given time, 41,000 people were in US prisons for drug charges. Today, that number is 500,000. This is shocking when you think about drug use exploding in the 1980s.

Stevenson shared an example of one of these harsh sentences when he encountered a woman serving a long one. Her crime was writing five bad checks to buy Christmas presents for her children. Each one was less than $150.

Extreme punishments like this for petty crime bred another extreme: mass incarceration. The more people we jailed for little crimes, the more crowded the prison system got. Today, we face a nationwide crisis because of mass incarceration.

The United States prison population has gone from 300,000 in the ‘70s to a whopping 2.3 million today. This isn’t even counting the millions more on parole or probation. These statistics mean that one out of every 15 people who were born in 2001 will end us in prison at some point.

It’s tragic to think about the problem of mass incarceration. But it’s even worse when you examine who is getting the worst of it. African Americans, women, and children get the brunt of the unfairness. Racial bias, not always obvious but deeply woven into American society, has made blacks be treated with unfair suspicion. Because of this suspicion, blacks are far more likely to be criminal suspects than whites. While one in 15 Americans are sent to prison in their lifetime, for African Americans, this number is one in three! In addition to African-Americans, the system increasingly mistreats women. Incarceration of women is rapidly escalating in the US. From 1980-2010 we saw an increase in female incarcerations of 646 percent, placing it one and a half times higher than that of men. Around 60 percent of women doing time are serving for drugs or property-related offenses. They also have to endure more harsh treatment in prisons. Many of them are in cramped quarters and have to endure the abuse of male guards. Guards sexually abuse them and receive…