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GUILTY TILL PROVEN INNOCENT: A Shocking Inside View Into America's Failing Justice System

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Lawrence Hartman

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“As Angela Davis has explained, if we accept uncritically the notion that prisons offer an answer, and that all we must do is improve our so-called justice systems, we evade the 'responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.' Our ultimate goal-if we truly aim to overcome our nation's habit of constructing enormous systems of racial and social control-cannot simply be to reduce the number of people behind bars. We must strive to create a nation in which caging people en masse-digitally or literally-and stripping them of basic civil and human rights for the rest of their lives is not only unnecessary but unthinkable. . . . The important question, however, is whether we want to celebrate as 'progress' any development that might reflect the morphing or evolution of the system, rather than its demise. Human rights champion Bryan Stevenson has observed that 'slavery didn't end; it evolved.' Today, we can see, in real time, the system of mass incarceration evolving before our eyes, as enormous investments are made in immigrant detention centers and digital prisons, and as growing numbers of white people become collateral damage in a war that was declared with black people in mind.”

JusticeHealingProgressCriminal Justice Reform
Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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“All nations seem to have had supreme confidence in the deterrent power of threatened and inflicted pain. They have regarded punishment as the shortest road to reformation...nations have relied on confiscation and degradation, on maimings, whippings, brandings, and exposure to public ridicule and contempt...Curiously enough, the fact is that, no matter how severe the punishments were, the crimes increased.”

HumanitarianismCriminal JusticeCriminal Justice Reform
Author:Robert G Ingersoll
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“Is it not true that the criminal is a natural product, and that society unconsciously produces these children of vice? Can we not safely take another step, and say that the criminal is a victim, as the diseased and deformed and insane are victims? We do not think of punishing a man because he is afflicted with disease--our desire is to find a cure. We send him, not to the penitentiary, but to the hospital, to an asylum...instead of punishing, we pity. If there are diseases of the mind...as there are diseases of the body...and if these deformities produce what we call vice, why should we punish the criminal, and pity those who are physically diseased?”

HumanitarianismCriminal JusticeCriminal Justice Reform
Author:Robert G Ingersoll
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