What’s Wrong
DO JUSTICE. LOVE MERCY. WALK HUMBLY.
In theory, all defendants in America are presumed innocent until guilt has been demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. In reality, the government’s burden to prove guilt is closely tied to the perceived social status of the defendant. Since the 1980s, poor people of color have been threatened by a growing risk of wrongful prosecution and wrongful conviction, a rollback of the due process protections enshrined in the Constitution. America’s War on Drugs and an over-reliance on incarceration have created new forms of injustice that jeopardize the equal citizenship of poor people of color. As a result, the American criminal justice system has been distorted by a regime of race and class inequality we call the New Jim Crow.
The American prison population has roughly quadrupled since 1980, largely in response to a ramped up War on Drugs. Since it was logistically impossible to expand the court system at the same cancerous rate as the prison system, legal mechanisms were adopted to expedite the conviction process. The Civil Rights movement has significantly increased the due process protections for people of color who have ascended the social ladder. Tragically, however, the threat of wrongful conviction is much higher for poor people of color at the dawn of the twenty-first century than it was in the darkest days of the Jim Crow period. When due process protections guaranteed by the US Constitution do not apply to at least a quarter of the American population, the criminal justice system loses its credibility. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “Justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.”
