Mercy on my Soul

It took the jury a little over four hours to determine my fate.

I sat in silence at the defendant’s hardwood table while twelve strangers filed into the courtroom to take their seats as my designated peers. I searched their faces for some clue of what they had decided, but their expressions were stoic.

Sitting with his fingers comfortably entwined on his desk, his brow creased with austerity, the judge issued his command in a voice seasoned with authority.

“Will the foreman please rise?”

Juror #8 stood with a sense of duty, summoned by an acknowledged superior. He was an older white man, perhaps in his early 60’s. Tall, with a casual polish, wearing a light-colored polo and tan slacks. He had the appearance of a man who might spend his spare time playing golf — a man I envisioned brushing shoulders with the social elite. Certainly no peer of mine, though an obvious choice for foreman. His presence seemed to demand deference.

He reminded me, in an odd sort of way, of Leslie Neilson, the bumbling and totally clueless detective who personified the satirical image of civic duty in the comedy classic, Naked Gun. I smirked within myself at the irony of what this charade evoked: a mocking comedy of justice where even the actors resemble the characters of a spoof.

“Has the jury reached a decision?” the judge asked the foreman.

“Yes, Your Honor, we have,” Leslie Neilson responded.

“Will the bailiff please convey the sealed decision to the clerk?”

The bailiff walked gracefully over to the foreman, received the decision and handed it to the clerk. My eyes were transfixed upon this scene as the clerk, remaining seated, accepted it with her right hand and passed it along to the judge with her left.

His Honor was a plump man of about fifty years, with rosy cheeks and a head absent of hair on the top. He carefully and deliberately opened the sealed decision and looked at its recommendation. Glancing at me with the same look of severity and condescension he had worn throughout my trial, he pushed the bridge of his reading glasses up the slope of his nose and returned his gaze to the decision before him. Lifting his pen, he began to write as the entire courtroom, including its audience of seven spectators, waited in anticipation for the outcome.

I glanced at the spectators. In the last row of the courtroom sat the Warden of Caledonia Prison Farm. He wore a smug look on his youthful, chubby face. He had the look of a white man who knew how to wield power. He could’ve easily passed for a plantation owner or a Southern politician with his good ole boy demeanor and sly and mischievous eyes.

Next to him sat his deputy, a taller, slimmer black man with a bit of a stoop in his posture. He had a bland, sullen face that looked to be worn down by years of servitude and posturing. His eyes carried heavy bags that spilled down onto his cheeks - eyes that hinted that they were filled with secrets that his sad and downward-turned lips would never utter.

Right behind me, in the second row, sat my mother and my sister, the only people in the world who cared enough about me to show up on this day when strangers would determine my fate. My mother, with her dignified head of gray hair and blue eyes that smiled while concealing a lifetime of pain, held tight to the hand of my sister.

Keisha and I had the same face. I could look into her eyes and see myself reflected in the best light. She was the only person in the world who saw me as a role model - someone she looked up to and took pride in calling her brother. Despite the accusations, despite my misdeeds, I was forever her hero, her protector, her guide.

Behind the prosecutor sat the aggrieved family of the victim. A grandmother and a mother who had both lost a man they called “Son.” The grandmother was graceful. Her light brown face still contained a youthful glow as she sat with dignity despite her grief. Her eyes, visible behind the large-framed glasses that covered almost a third of her face, had a quiet kindness to them. Her face showed mercy, compassion, and empathy for her daughter’s pain.

Her daughter, though an obvious younger version of the grandmother, had none of the kindness or mercy in her eyes. Instead, her eyes were like daggers of hatred that I could not bear to meet, lest they pierce my soul and further torment the guilt-ridden heart of my conscience.

Two rows behind them sat a reporter, who I was able to identify by his scribbling pen and miniature notepad. From his perspective across the room, he wrote the official story.

As I focused my attention on the judge, I felt my heart rising slowly up the insides of my chest. It reached the top of my throat and lodged itself there, holding me breathless as the judge finished whatever he had been writing and handed the jury’s recommendation back to the clerk.

Composing himself, he sat up erectly from the perch of his throne and with both arms fanned out the sides of his robe. He pulled it tightly around his shoulders as if it were the cape of some superhero who was about to impose justice on the evil villain.

“The jury, having found the defendant, Michael Jerome Braxton, guilty of murder in the first degree, sentences him to death,” the judge began.

His words continued on, but my heart sank from my throat down to the pit of my stomach as everything except my thoughts receded into the shadows around me. Words and sounds became nothing but background chatter in a movie that I now seemed to be watching from outside of myself.

I looked around at this drama unfolding and felt my soul hovering above me as if it were fleeing to seek refuge from the tsunami of emotion waiting to burst forth inside of me.

Amidst the chatter I heard a request for each member of the jury to stand individually and affirm their verdict. I watched in a clouded daze as the figures of men and women see-sawed up and down in succession to acknowledge their fateful decision.

Then, suddenly, there was a pause.

A black woman, perhaps in her thirties with a brown complexion and medium build, appeared overwhelmed by the burden of the occasion. She choked back heavy sobs and continued to sit after her name was called. Every eye in the courtroom was now on her.

I looked at her face and could see the difficulty etched in her features due to the battle waging inside of her. My heart raised barely a micron from its pit with a glimpse of hope. The juror sitting to her right, another black woman of similar age, gave her a tender stroke on the back, consoling her and perhaps empathizing with the difficulty of the task. Then the woman looked at me and a body-racking lament erupted from her throat. Gripping the arm of the chair, she struggled to pull herself to her feet and utter a weak “yes” before falling back to her seat and sobbing.

I almost wanted to console her myself, seeing the pain she had to endure to stand behind a decision that she ultimately believed right. It touched my heart that even though this woman had sentenced me to death, she recognized my humanity. It caused her great pain to participate in my execution.

For a moment I was lost in my thoughts, still numb to the reality of what was actually happening to me. Separated from the part of me that had feeling, everything became white noise again.

I could hear the drone of the caped crusader’s rote-voice from a distance in my mind. Words and phrases were being uttered about being handed over to the custody of the warden of Central Prison to be held until my death was carried out. I heard a date of February 8, 1998 being announced for execution. But in some weird way, none of this was happening to me. I was just another spectator observing the proceedings along with everyone else.

Until suddenly, I heard my name being called.

“Michael Jerome Braxton!” The sound roared like it was being shouted down from the expanse of heaven. It was like a jolt, and my soul collided violently with my body. Once again I was sitting at the defendant’s table.

I looked up to see the eyes of the judge peering down at me over the rim of his glasses. His gavel, like a mighty weapon held firmly in his right hand, seemed ready to smite the wicked. On his face was a look of frightening condemnation as he spoke the words that sent tremors through my bones and made my soul faint — words indicating that my judgment was no longer a concern of this world, for now I was to face the judgment of the Divine.

With a thundering boom of his gavel, his voice reverberated with a tone of finality: “MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL!”

I looked back at my family. My sister’s face was a mask of torment. Never in my life had I seen a face so anguished and distraught. She wept until her cries became a wailing hiccup and her body convulsed in her seat.

My mother reached out to me, her hand pleading for one last touch of the son she had birthed into this world. But as the guards surrounded me, her beautiful eyes became puddles of the saddest pain. She mouthed the words “I love you” as they took me away.


by Michael Braxton

"You are men, and I am your God."

Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. Prophesy and say to those shepherds, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “Woe, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flock? You eat the fat and clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat sheep without feeding the flock. Those who are sickly you have not strengthened, the diseased you have not healed, the broken you have not bound up, the scattered you have not brought back, nor have you sought for the lost; but with force and with severity you have dominated them. They were scattered for lack of a shepherd, and they became food for every beast of the field and were scattered. My flock wandered through all the mountains and on every high hill; My flock was scattered over all the surface of the earth, and there was no one to search or seek for them.”’”

Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: “As I live,” declares the Lord God, “surely because My flock has become a prey, My flock has even become food for all the beasts of the field for lack of a shepherd, and My shepherds did not search for My flock, but rather the shepherds fed themselves and did not feed My flock; therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: ‘Thus says the Lord God, “Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will demand My sheep from them and make them cease from feeding sheep. So the shepherds will not feed themselves anymore, but I will deliver My flock from their mouth, so that they will not be food for them.”’”

For thus says the Lord God, “Behold, I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out. As a shepherd cares for his herd in the day when he is among his scattered sheep, so I will care for My sheep and will deliver them from all the places to which they were scattered on a cloudy and gloomy day. I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries and bring them to their own land; and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel, by the streams, and in all the inhabited places of the land. I will feed them in a good pasture, and their grazing ground will be on the mountain heights of Israel. There they will lie down on good grazing ground and feed in rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I will feed My flock and I will lead them to rest,” declares the Lord God. “I will seek the lost, bring back the scattered, bind up the broken and strengthen the sick; but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with judgment.

“As for you, My flock, thus says the Lord God, ‘Behold, I will judge between one sheep and another, between the rams and the male goats. Is it too slight a thing for you that you should feed in the good pasture, that you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pastures? Or that you should drink of the clear waters, that you must foul the rest with your feet? As for My flock, they must eat what you tread down with your feet and drink what you foul with your feet!’”

Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them, “Behold, I, even I, will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you push with side and with shoulder, and thrust at all the weak with your horns until you have scattered them abroad, therefore, I will deliver My flock, and they will no longer be a prey; and I will judge between one sheep and another.

"Then I will set over them one shepherd, My servant David, and he will feed them; he will feed them himself and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and My servant David will be prince among them; I the Lord have spoken.

“I will make a covenant of peace with them and eliminate harmful beasts from the land so that they may live securely in the wilderness and sleep in the woods. I will make them and the places around My hill a blessing. And I will cause showers to come down in their season; they will be showers of blessing. Also the tree of the field will yield its fruit and the earth will yield its increase, and they will be secure on their land. Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I have broken the bars of their yoke and have delivered them from the hand of those who enslaved them. They will no longer be a prey to the nations, and the beasts of the earth will not devour them; but they will live securely, and no one will make them afraid. I will establish for them a renowned planting place, and they will not again be victims of famine in the land, and they will not endure the insults of the nations anymore. Then they will know that I, the Lord their God, am with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are My people,” declares the Lord God. “As for you, My sheep, the sheep of My pasture, you are men, and I am your God,” declares the Lord God.

Ezekiel 34

My Experience of Solitary Confinement

Recently the PBS program "Frontline" aired an updated documentary about the overuse of solitary confinement in the United States prison system. You can watch the documentary here.

Having recently spent about two weeks locked in exactly the same kind of cage, and pondering a system in which even a moderate dissenting voice arguing for reconciliation instead of exile and slavery is not tolerated by a fearful, totalitarian regime, I watched the program with the definite sense that we as prisoners today are engaged in a struggle for our very humanity.

I did nothing violent or threatening to anyone, certainly nothing to justify being treated as dangerous. My infraction, rather, was perceived as a threat to the system itself, and so I was held in solitary confinement for almost two weeks and then banished to another penitentiary, away from the community I wrote about in a previous post.

In my two weeks in solitary confinement, I learned that a stripped-down, burned-out concrete box with a steel door and a toilet without toilet paper are all that are required to bring me to the point of kicking the door and screaming to get attention in desperate frustration. This type of outburst is a behavior I had witnessed before from the other side of the door as a minimum security inmate. I was comforted by the thought that I could never be brought that low. The brute fact is that had I not acted out this way, the man in the cell next to me and I would have remained soiled with our own feces. I had to throw a fit to receive toilet paper. Aside from shoving food through the double-locking pie flaps that eliminate human contact, the guards ignored our cells, as if they were empty. And I might have used my hand or shirt and held on to my dignity out of sheer stubbornness, but the man in the cell next to me was my best friend of 14 years, and I knew he would not act out that way. It was my fault he was there, and I could not bear the thought of him being reduced to having no toilet paper.

I tried every manner of normal, polite behavior, confident that the officers would respond in kind to someone making the effort to remain civilized in the midst of that hammering cacophony. But what I learned instead was that polite, normal requests almost never receive a response. Only those willing to act out in the most vile, inhuman, animalistic ways could even get the slightest attention from the staff for the things they needed or wanted.

Confined in that kennel, listening to the supernaturally loud noise of all the other animals competing for what they could only receive from the officer milling around and ignoring them outside in the dayroom, the bare facts of the situation reduced my humanity to a simple choice: kick and scream like an animal, or do without the necessities of civilized life. Either way felt like a a most bitter defeat.

I struggled over such choices the entire time I sat in that hole. Every moment I imagined all the people who know and love me - my family, friends, the good people that attend church services with me, both free and inmate, my spiritual mentors, my professors and allies in the community - and what they would think or feel if they could see me in this situation, squatting like an animal, held captive by my own body's functions in a concrete box that still bore marks on the walls where a previous inhabitant literally tried to destroy his confines with anything at hand. He went so far as to tear the metal out of the walls, set the place on fire, and covered the walls and ceiling with feces.

The literal function of these cages is to ignore and degrade the humanity of those placed within them. The authorities who claim solitary confinement is necessary, authorities that are even now preparing to christen the first "supermax" unit in Tennessee at Riverbend, these authorities contend that the cages are required for prisoners who display a lack of humanity, who are a danger to others and to the system itself. I, however, found that the use of the cage very quickly and effectively functioned to diminish my humanity.

Terrifying.

The threat of this power now looms over me even as I write these words. I began writing for this blog with certain goals in mind, as set forth in the original post "Who We Are and What We Want." I affirm now my absolute dedication to the ideals expressed there. Recently my entire world has suffered apocalypse, but I will not return in anger. I know that some people celebrated a job well done when they destroyed my life and gutted a whole community, a community which is still under senseless attack. Some people have lived in the one-sided cartoon world of cops and robbers for a long time now. But I remain dedicated to the principles of reconciliation and live with hope for a better day precisely because, other than the humanity which they may one day take by force, hope and the bonds of love which cannot be broken by a tragically ignorant system defending itself are all I have left.

by Moses

The History of Racism Behind Ferguson

Here is an article by a former prosecutor explaining how Ferguson is not so much about the conflict between Officer Wilson and Mike Brown, as it is about deep-seeded racism that has plagued our hearts and our institutions of "justice" throughout the entirety of American history.

Keeping Up Appearances

I stood at attention outside my cell door this morning at 9:15 for inspection. The pod was nearly full of inmates with nowhere else to go. Fe men have jobs or are enrolled in classes anymore, especially in this unit where administration is quietly and unofficially concentrating gang members and those with class A and B write-ups. The unemployment rate is around 85%, so almost 100 men stood outside their cells on the lower and upper tiers as the unit manager and the CCO entered the pod and began the ceremony by addressing the men.

"Good morning," the unit manager said. Nobody answered.

"Good morning!" he repeated, and somebody said something unintelligible off to my right, which sufficed to let us move on. Unit manager B____ is a levelheaded veteran of the Department. He has the correct mixture of firmness combined with enough confidence to let things go that don't matter, which is required to handle this type of unit effectively, a set of traits now too rare among staff. Anyone who stands too firmly on ceremony and cannot take a few jibes without getting ruffled in this high-pressure environment quickly and inevitable escalates tensions and loses control.

"We're okay. Not good, just okay," he says. "I haven't been over here in a couple of days."

These daily cell inspections have been intensified this week since the prison itself is being inspected by outside personnel, a yearly event that makes appearances even more critical to the staff. The appearance of order, cleanliness, and security will be presented this week at any cost. To ensure our cells appear especially uniform and correct is one of many visual priorities, the only kind of priorities that appear to matter.

We know and they know and they know that we know it's all a temporary show, and it's the same now as it is every year. The language they use is, "Y'all know we have to do this, so let's get some cooperation and try to make it as painless as possible." And with the inmates' cooperation, several hundred spit-shine jobs take place the week before the inspection. Then the inspectors show up, walk around, and check things off a list. Afterward everyone relaxes a few days, and then operations return to the daily cell inspections mandated by Haslam's campaign promise in 2010, to make it hard on us.

At the first opportunity I got when the staff wasn't looking, I ducked into my cell and removed some cleaning rags hanging beneath my sink - not allowed. The unit manager was being strict today. Otherwise I felt confident we would pass, so I stepped back outside after peeking first and stood at attention by the door again. I had been up since 7:00 a.m. and had spent half and hour cleaning and prepping the cell after m cellmate had gone to work. Daily routine. And as soon as the inspection was complete, I would reassemble our cell the way we actually lived. Daily routine.

While waiting for my turn to be inspected, I overheard with some interest a debate over how to get away with the whiskey-cooking operation in a cell. Simply burning incense wouldn't cover the smell of a batch prepping, one guy argued, sending the message flying across the pod while everyone remained standing at attention. Some cleaning fluids were sprayed and finally the offending door was closed in the hope it would be skipped. We all waited to see if it was passed by . . . and it was. Shalom.

I stood waiting a while. People were restless and bored and started to murmur. "Now if we're talking, we're not in compliance!" the unit manager said. "Nuh nuh nuh nuh-nuh, nuh nuh nuh nuh-nuh," some inmate mocked. The unit manager cocked his eye and continued to the next cell. It was quieter.

"Good morning," he said to me in front of my cell when he went in. "Good morning," I replied while I suppressed the basic human instinct to resist having one's only personal space casually violated, judged, and raked over, after just the promise of it happening in the future had been enough that morning to cause me to rearrange every single possession I own in a way not intuitive or convenient. Then I also suppressed the question which naturally arose in my mind as a man who has served sixteen years already and faces the need to live permanently somewhere on this earth, whether my basic human dignity will endure the Chinese water torture effect of such daily assaults for the rest of my long life, or whether I and everyone else will simply go mad long before then.

Two minutes later the unit manager emerged with a rolled piece of maroon upholstery fabric in his hand, about six inches wife and twenty-four long, which my cellmate uses to cover the cell window when he uses the toilet.

"See this?" He holds it out to me, and I nod." "Not good. It's not good to have colored pieces of cloth like this in your cell!"

At that moment, an elaborate response played out in my head, and I suppose I may be the worst kind of coward for writing about it now instead of just saying it out loud. This is how it went in my head:

"But Mr. B____, how can a piece of upholstery cloth be good or bad? Is God looking down upon us right now and declaring 'BAD!' The human race struggled for millennia to produce the technology to manufacture such embroidered cloth, but now there are a trillion shreds of such material in our landfills. Nobody cares. And you've been around longer than me, so you remember just as I do only fifteen years ago all over the state men in our prisons had bits of carpet on their floors, cushions on their toilets, bed clothing from Wal-Mart, and even wall hangings to warm the walls. Nobody cared. Why would they? They were still the poorest, most pathetic people you knew, barely scratching out an existence on the planet, merely trying to take some pride in their hovels. And the thought of holding up a bit of cloth and calling it 'bad' would have seemed ridiculous to men such as you and me. What has happened to us? Why this obsession with the way things look instead of the way they really are? Why not inspect the inmates themselves instead of their uniforms? How about that guy with the cuts all over his face? What happened to him while the inspectors weren't watching?"

Instead, I said nothing and looked at him and looked at the piece of cloth and nodded. I know it does not good to protest to the person who has a job to do. After all, he is also following orders. "Look, I hear what you're saying," he would say, "but you know I'm just doing my job. I've got people watching me and they expect me to get it done or they'll find somebody else who will. I got mouths to feed. So let's make this as painless as possible, okay?"

As painless as possible. But for whom?

In the movie Saving Private Ryan, there's a scene in which a German soldier kills one of the American heroes by driving a knife slowly into his chest. "Shhh," the German urges as the American's strength fades and the blade slowly sinks deeper. "Shhh. Shhh."

by Moses

A New Paradigm

In prison I often look around myself and wonder why our citizens accept this state of affairs. Mass incarceration is a tricky puzzle and an expensive problem in our State. Like other states, we have packed men and women into prisons as quickly as we could afford to build them without much thought for what the prisoners would do inside these expensive containers. Gone are the days when every prisoner was expected to have a job or take a class. There aren't enough opportunities to go around. No doubt the Tennessee Department of Correction would portray it otherwise, but in the unit in which I live, unemployment hovers around 80%. Drug abuse, gambling, gang activity, and violence are the order of the day. Our governor and the TDOC commissioner would rather folks not know this, but to be fair, this situation has been building a long time. Having watched it evolve firsthand, I can actually sympathize with the challenge they face. The system is fast-approaching a breaking point similar to the crises faced elsewhere in our nation. This is particularly due to a shift in focus on incarceration.

The concept of rehabilitation is an outdated artifact left over from another era. I don't know why this fact hasn't further penetrated the popular consciousness. Experts and textbooks acknowledge that we no longer concern ourselves with what prisoners actually do in prison. The focus for some time has been simply to increase the capacity of beds in much the same way a burgeoning corporation may increase its market share. We have abandoned all attempts to help an inmate improve, despite the fact that the vast majority will be released back into our communities.

Rehabilitation as an operational goal of incarceration began with the first large prisons in Pennsylvania and New York. It is debatable whether prisons have ever rehabilitated, thus the constant appeals for reform from prisoners and advocates that have understood from the beginning that these institutions do more harm than good. In the name of rehabilitation, countless men and women have suffered unsafe forced labor and the psychological damage of solitary confinement.

As long as people believe prisons are helpful to prisoners and necessary to protect society, the place of prisons in our world is safe. However, as soon as we start researching, pulling back the veil, so to speak, or if we or a family member spend time locked up, a different picture emerges. We begin to see just how damaging prisons are not just to inmates, but to the soul of our entire society, and we cry out for reform.

The changes that have come to the American system of punishment have not altered the landscape in any meaningful way. We can see this by noting that the critiques offered against prisons in the early 1800's closely resemble the protests of modern reformers. As Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish, "It is time to look deeper than ever before into this puzzle and to demand more fundamental changes than have yet been seriously considered.

From the inside, it seems clear that the obscene number of people incarcerated for increasingly long sentences in Tennessee bears no relation to an increased threat of crime. Rather, our unprecedented prison population represents a conscious choice to crusade against people who suffer from complex but identifiable conditions that are inevitably associated with crime, such as poverty, lack of education, lack of opportunities for work that pays a living wage, and self-medication.

Politicians have misrepresented to us that crime could be legislated away without looking deeper into the root causes of crime. We have been content to treat symptoms without diagnosing the underlying disease. All the while, we shovel millions of dollars into the money pit that is the criminal justice system/prison-industrial complex. So many resources are wasted in vain pursuits. Is this really the only response to crime we can come up with? Are we so obsessed with the myth of individualism that we cannot be made to care for other members of our community? Are we content to throw people away as though they were nothing? Are you content to let people like me rot in a state-sponsored human garbage dump?

Every person I have ever met on the inside or outside has a story, a family, caregivers, lovers. What the legislators make view as human garbage is of infinite value to someone, somewhere. Yet the law will not see the positive or the potential for good within a lawbreaker. It can only treat that person according to his or her worst deed. The criminal justice system is a weapon forged against the elements of society that we do not understand because we have had neither the courage nor the love to look at them.

We fearfully cry, "But look what they've done! Look at their guilt! We must be protected from them!" We act as though every one of the 2.3 million people that are locked up in America made a well-reasoned, conscious choice to commit a crime. Without diminishing personal responsibility, we should also acknowledge that the vast majority of these people would not have willingly chosen a life centered around crime or violence, all things being equal. People who are strangled by poverty or addiction are not autonomous in the same way as middle-class, educated people are. Yet we have been content to transplant whole neighborhoods of poor, young, minority men into prisons. These young men were caught up in the cradle-to-prison pipeline, and their fathers and uncles and cousins are waiting to welcome them to their final destination.

What hope of rehabilitation is there for the young man who did not know his father, and due to a learning disability and a failing school system, never learned to read? What hope of rehabilitation is there when his childhood was one extended nightmare of violence, abuse, and neglect? What hope is there when his only chance at belonging to a family came from a street gang? Laws that are passed by upper-middle-class white people cannot account for these narratives.

In the end, prisoners and their families must come to understand that together, they can organize and form a political body to advance their interests, proclaim their narrative, and make their collective voice heard by a society that has for too long been at best apathetic and ignorant, and at worst sadistic and hateful. No longer can we afford to toss people away by the millions merely based on the legal concept of "guilt," while other members of society are in fact guilty of greater sins. Our response to guilt should not be more destructive than the original harm done. No longer can we settle for treating crime as a disease when it is in reality only a symptom of deeper social ills that we have left untreated for generations. Taxpayers must hold our governor, the TDOC commissioner, and our legislators to a higher standard and not let them get away with funneling millions of dollars to corporate interests while spewing cheap, "tough-on-crime" rhetoric.

We do not merely need reform. We need a new criminal justice paradigm. It is time to dream and act.

We Need to Talk About an Injustice

Bryan Stevenson needs less than 22 minutes to educate us about the problems in the American criminal justice system (racism, disproportionate treatment of the poor, sentencing children to die in prison, wrongful convictions, the death penalty) and to inspire us to care for one another, to respect our common humanity, to acknowledge that what affects the least of us affects us all, and to recover our identity by caring for the people on the margins of our society.

Click here to watch the video. Then share it.