By Julianne Malveaux — Twenty-one-year-old Deandre Sullivan overslept one morning. Selected to serve on a jury, he was supposed to report by 9 a.m. He didn’t awaken until 11 and figured he’d have to pay a fine for his no-show. But hours after he failed to appear, he was hauled into a West Palm Beach, Florida court. There, Judge John Kastrenakus sentenced him to 10 days of incarceration, a fine,…
By Ron Hampton — Big-city prosecutors and police chiefs recently attended a summit in Washington, D.C. held at the office of the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank that advises police chiefs. But some prosecutors and police chiefs decided not to attend. The traditional police community is at it again in America. The police chiefs are claiming that newly elected representatives and progressive prosecutors along with some police chiefs…
WASHINGTON (NBC News) — Working to prove himself to African American voters, Pete Buttigieg is releasing an 18-page plan Thursday to improve conditions and opportunity for black Americans on everything from the health care, education and criminal justice systems to entrepreneurship and access to credit. The wide-ranging plan constitutes Buttigieg’s initial version of a proposal for reparations for slavery. His campaign says it views it as a “complement” to H.R. 40, legislation working…
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson — The Central Park 5 has been the textbook poster case for the one thing that has consistently and horribly racially disfigured America’s criminal justice system. That’s the stain of wrongful convictions. The 5 have the happy and tragic distinction of being the most celebrated wrongfully convicted prisoners released from prison but in the decade since their exoneration and release hundreds of other prisoners with much…
But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. Connie Hassett-Walker, The Conversation — Outrage over racial profiling and the killing of African Americans by police officers and vigilantes in recent years helped give rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new. There are many precedents to the Ferguson,…
By Julianne Malveaux — Many know them as the Central Park Five, but filmmaker Ava DuVernay forces to us see the five wrongfully convicted men as individuals. Their names are names we must remember, as individual, courageous, principled Black and Brown men. They are Korey Wise, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, and Kevin Richardson. DuVernay’s new Netflix mini-series, “When They See Us”, ask what “they” see when they see…
Kim Foxx, the Illinois State’s Attorney for Cook County, announced that her office is set to expunge thousands of misdemeanor cannabis convictions in the coming months. By Ny Magee, The Grio — Kim Foxx, the Illinois State’s Attorney for Cook County, announced that her office is set to expunge thousands of misdemeanor cannabis convictions in the coming months. Foxx and her office are in talks with Code for America to identify minor marijuana cases in the…
In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice. By Rachel Kushner, New York Times — There’s an anecdote that Ruth Wilson Gilmore likes to share about being at an environmental-justice conference in Fresno in 2003. People from all over California’s Central Valley had gathered to talk about the serious environmental hazards their communities faced, mostly as a…
Text calls on member states to tackle discrimination against people of African descent. By Jennifer Rankin, The Guardian — The European parliament has called for action to tackle the “structural racism” facing millions of Europeans of African descent in an unprecedented resolution that was overwhelmingly approved by MEPs. The resolution calls on European Union member states to develop national anti-racism strategies to deal with discrimination in education, health, housing, policing, the justice…
A new study found that people who experience discrimination are almost twice as likely as others to struggle with hunger. By Greg Kaufmann, The Nation — With more than 40 million people in the country struggling with hunger, anti-hunger advocates in the United States have their work cut out for them. In 2017, nearly 12 percent of all US households were food insecure—meaning they didn’t have access to enough food for all household members…
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