The Root: We Can’t Afford To Not Fix Justice System
By Benjamin Todd Jealous and Lateefah Simon (NPR.com) – Reforming the nation’s criminal-justice system is one of the most urgent civil rights issues of our time. One shocking fact illustrates why: More African-American men are entangled in the criminal-justice system today than were enslaved in 1850.
How did we get here? The rise in America’s penchant for punishment can be traced as far back as the 1964 presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, each of whom made law and order a defining plank of his platform.
President Richard Nixon continued the trend, framing Democrats as “soft on crime” and pushing for tough law-enforcement policies in opposition to President Johnson’s credo of tackling crime through a “war on poverty.” “Doubling the conviction rate in this country would do more to cure crime in America than quadrupling the funds for [Hubert] Humphrey’s war on poverty,” Nixon told voters.
Since then, Republicans have pushed — and Democrats have embraced — a so-called tough-on-crime approach to keeping us safe, one that emphasizes harsh measures after crimes have already occurred and that disproportionately punishes poor and minority communities rather than addressing the root causes of crime and preventing it in the first place.
As a result, our wrong-headed approach to justice and safety is breaking the bank of pretty much every state and breaking the spirit of communities across the country. Today the U.S. accounts for 5 percent of the world’s population but has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. We imprison almost 1 million more people than China, at a cost to taxpayers of $68 billion in 2010. Read the full story here.
Benjamin Todd Jealous is president and CEO of the NAACP. Lateefah Simon is executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area.
