Some prosecutors and policymakers are beginning to work toward a legal system designed to benefit all people.
Over the past few years, statistics on how the U.S. justice system is failing its citizens have come fast and hard. With more than 2 million people detained in jails and prisons, we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world—a rate that’s increased 500% in the past five decades Possibly as many as 482,000 people currently held in local jails are there simply because they’re too poor to pay bail; they haven’t been convicted of a crime.
African Americans are three times more likely to be killed by police than White people, and Black men have a 1-in-3 chance of being imprisoned at some point in their lifetimes. And two-thirdsof those who’ve been incarcerated are rearrested within three years of their release.
Those numbers paint a picture of a justice system that’s anything but just—or effective. Rather than focusing on rehabilitation, our police, courts, and detention systems are aimed at retribution, particularly toward people of color; they harshly punish those who break the law instead of addressing the real reasons crimes occur, experts say.
But change is afoot. A wide range of justice-focused nonprofits, legal advocates, academics, and activists are developing and implementing concepts that, together, form a radically different vision of what crime and punishment could look like in the United States.
Re-visioning means thinking big, and these groups are working toward a wholly new framework: one that gives people and communities what they actually need. Instead of continued neglect, low-income communities get resources they’ve identified as priorities. In the place of Miranda warnings, plea deals, and prison cells are truth-telling, accountability, and forgiveness. And pain—which lies at the heart of so many of the crimes that currently wind up before the justice system—is met with love, transformation, and healing.
“The justice system is a hammer, and not everything is a nail. We don’t want to hammer people who use violence,” says sujatha baliga, who leads the Restorative Justice Project at the Bay Area-based organization Impact Justice. “I see the criminal legal system as a system of violence. We need to use nonviolence, in the Gandhian sense. It’s not passive: we’re actively working to end oppression.”