{"id":12041,"date":"2012-12-09T00:39:15","date_gmt":"2012-12-09T05:39:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=12041"},"modified":"2012-12-09T00:39:15","modified_gmt":"2012-12-09T05:39:15","slug":"smithsonian-profiles-bryan-stevenson-mass-incarceration-defines-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2012\/12\/09\/smithsonian-profiles-bryan-stevenson-mass-incarceration-defines-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Smithsonian profiles Bryan Stevenson: ‘Mass Incarceration Defines Us’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Chris Hedges writes a long, inspiring profile of Bryan Stevenson for Smithsonian<\/em> magazine. Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, was awarded the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award for social justice. (He\u2019s also a graduate of my alma mater, Eastern University<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Hedges\u2019 article\u00a0is a hefty piece, but it\u2019s well worth your time. You will feel sadness, anger and hope, sometimes all at the same time. Hedges tells Stevenson\u2019s remarkable story, and in doing so conveys Stevenson\u2019s important message: \u201cWhy Mass Incarceration Defines Us as a Society<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a taste:<\/p>\n

It was here in this square \u2014 a square adorned with a historical marker celebrating the presence in Montgomery of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy \u2014 that men and women fell to their knees weeping and beseeched slave-holders not to separate them from their husbands, wives or children. It was here that girls and boys screamed as their fathers or mothers were taken from them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cThis whole street is rich with this history,\u201d he says. \u201cBut nobody wants to talk about this slavery stuff. Nobody.\u201d He wants to start a campaign to erect monuments to that history, on the sites of lynchings, slave auctions and slave depots. \u201cWhen we start talking about it, people will be outraged. They will be provoked. They will be angry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stevenson expects anger because he wants to discuss the explosive rise in inmate populations, the disproportionate use of the death penalty against people of color and the use of life sentences against minors as part of a continuum running through the South\u2019s ugly history of racial inequality, from slavery to Jim Crow to lynching.<\/p>\n

Equating the enslavement of innocents with the imprisonment of convicted criminals is apt to be widely resisted, but he sees it as a natural progression of his work. Over the past quarter-century, Stevenson has become perhaps the most important advocate for death-row inmates in the United States.<\/p>\n

\u2026 EJI\u2019s office is in a building that once housed a school for whites seeking to defy integration. The building is in the same neighborhood as Montgomery\u2019s slave depots. For Stevenson, that history matters.<\/p>\n

Mass incarceration defines us as a society, Stevenson argues, the way slavery once did. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world\u2019s population but imprisons a quarter of the world\u2019s inmates. Most of those 2.3 million inmates are people of color. One out of every three black men in their 20s is in jail or prison, on probation or parole, or bound in some other way to the criminal justice system. Once again families are broken apart. Once again huge numbers of black men are disenfranchised, because of their criminal records. Once again people are locked out of the political and economic system. Once again we harbor within our midst black outcasts, pariahs. As the poet Yusef Komunyakaa said: \u201cThe cell block has replaced the auction block.\u201d<\/p>\n

In opening a discussion of American justice and America\u2019s racial history, Stevenson hopes to help create a common national narrative, one built finally around truth rather than on the cultivated myths of the past, that will allow blacks and whites finally to move forward.<\/p>\n

\u2026 Stevenson turns frequently to the Bible. He quotes to me from the Gospel of John, where Jesus says of the woman who committed adultery: \u201cHe that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.\u201d He tells me an elderly black woman once called him a \u201cstone catcher.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no such thing as being a Christian and not being a stone catcher,\u201d he says. \u201cBut that is exhausting. You\u2019re not going to catch them all. And it hurts. If it doesn\u2019t make you sad to have to do that, then you don\u2019t understand what it means to be engaged in an act of faith. \u2026 But if you have the right relationship to it, it is less of a burden, finally, than a blessing. It makes you feel stronger.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. 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