Hmm, my god how disadvantage accumulates many times over with poverty. You must read this at The New York Times (via Tedra Osell) and think about how we might run our justice systems differently:
“What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?”
The woman was Susan Burton, who knows a lot about being processed through the criminal justice system.
Her odyssey began when a Los Angeles police cruiser ran over and killed her 5-year-old son. Consumed with grief and without access to therapy or antidepressant medications, Susan became addicted to crack cocaine. She lived in an impoverished black community under siege in the “war on drugs,” and it was but a matter of time before she was arrested and offered the first of many plea deals that left her behind bars for a series of drug-related offenses. Every time she was released, she found herself trapped in an under-caste, subject to legal discrimination in employment and housing.
This is an American story and the incarceration rates in the USA are truly mind-blowing – I mean they are stop, take a deep breath, pinch yourself and check you are not imagining what you just read, kinda mind-blowing – but there are some parallels here with the Aboriginal incarceration rates in Australia, too.
Now, watch this Def Poetry from the political poet Black Ice (via Sociological Images):
blue milk 
I also think about it as a motherhood issue in terms of the way children are treated by the “justice” system here, with it dovetailing into the education system. When schools have full-time police officers, shockingly students tend to get treated much more harshly – getting charged and put into the system rather than being disciplined by schools.
And since there’s racial bias in charging and sentencing every step of the way, this really intensifies the funneling into prison that goes on in poorer, primarily POC neighbourhoods anyway. Children without parents, parents without children… heartbreaking.
Absolutely, and the damage done to people when you force them to be “children without parents, parents without children” is staggering.. the social costs are enormous and multi-generational. Heartbroken people become broken people very easily.
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