Quotes About Justice

The skeptic often retorts that the "criminally-minded" regularly refuse to admit their own wrongdoing and responsibility. But this is a callous and self-justifying skepticism that overlooks just how easy it is to fall down the road to prison as a result of others' unfair practices, vicious action, or because of the vicissitudes of navigating corporate-driven dispossession, poverty, and racism.

The 2014 study of the National Research Council found that incarceration continued to rise even while the rate of violent crime decreased.

Their means may be strategically effective as in the work of the Black Panthers in Chicago, with Fred Hampton's efforts there before he was assassinated by police. Their means may be, in other contexts, less effective than were the Black Panthers and other groups. In either case, though, they are termed "social dynamite" because they are, or can be perceived as, a major threat to the functioning of the economic and political order.

Although African Americans are usually no more than 13 percent of the U.S. population, 40 percent of state death row populations are African American. In some states, like Pennsylvania, 60 percent of the death row population is African American. On federal death row, over 60 percent are from communities of color.

The death penalty is almost universally a punishment for the poor, for those without the money to get competent counsel. The adage remains true about the death penalty: "Those without the capital get the punishment.

I am claiming that the making of life for the oppressed is a love of the enemy in the sense that the enemy is challenged to come out of prevailing systems of death to embrace, support, and enter into what makes for life and justice for the oppressed and ultimately for all.

There is no life for the enemy apart from what makes life and justice for those they oppress. Love of the enemy animated by Thurman's "vital content" means putting an end to the system of death which enemies create, inhabit, and by which they maintain structures afflicting oppressed peoples.

A counter-theatric to state terror is an effective militant practice toward this end. This is "radical love" in the sense foregrounded by Cornel West, which bases its challenging love of the enemy not just upon the enemy's needs, but upon an advocacy and fight for "the unloved,"[4] for the oppressed who need effective techniques and institutions of justice into which they can be liberated.

To understand prisons as racially structured, consider, first, how the racialized make-up of the prison population is usually described. Writers often deploy a kind of shorthand here, stating the prisons are made up of over 60 percent or more prisoners of color.[80] At one point that figure was as high as 70 percent for "'minorities,"' or 'people of color'.

Second, carceral terror, by implanting fear in the incarcerated, often returns persons broken by fear into their communities. I stressed in the first edition of this book that systems of punitive terror create through brutal prison culture a certain number of predators that often return to the streets, increasing the vulnerabilities of poor neighborhoods.

Violated peoples do not forget. They dream alternatives and organize against overwhelming power. In the U.S., organized and creative resistance has an equally long history. In

We cannot serve the executed God and the god of religious respectability.

The Research Council concluded, "Most studies estimate the crime-reducing effect of incarceration to be small and some report that the size of the effect diminishes with the scale of incarceration." The

We face today an especially sinister emergence, not just more police violence, mass incarceration, and a death penalty, but the rise of the U.S. "carceral" or "penal state." Here

White youth also often receive extensive assistance as well as tolerance when they develop drug problems. In contrast, blacks, Latinos/as, and Arab- and Southeast Asian-Americans among the stigmatized poor are without such counseling services and often simply hustled off to jail. It

It is cynical, often hypocritical, and self-defeating to declare all drug offenders violent and then withdraw from them, especially from the poor among them, the resources needed to redress the problems that create drug use.

U.S. death rows, still displaying over 3,000 persons, are similarly sites of torture. After a person is sentenced to death, he or she is held in situations approximating solitary confinement, sometimes for decades, under prolonged and anguishing anticipation of the state's calculation of an execution date. Judges

Judges' rulings on particular cases of such death row confinement have declared it cruel and unusual, a form of torture, as have international jurists.

If Christians do not act on a solidarity with criminalized populations, locked-down communities, and with others suffering extrajudicial and judicial violence, they themselves, along with many other citizens who think themselves free from the criminal justice system's negative effects, may find themselves easily caught up in the indignities of today's punishment regime, if they are not already.

The phrase "executed God" does important conceptual work symbolically, and with practical effects for communities that center themselves around such a notion. The

Critique of the 1 percent's domination predates, it should be recalled, the "Occupy" movement's popularizing of the notion. In fact, Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked often on the notion of the 1 percent in his early speeches of the 1950s: "They tell me that one tenth of one percent of the population controls more than forty percent of the wealth. Oh America, how often have you taken necessities from the masses to give luxury to the classes.

Men of conscience have got to join together, Jack. Or nothing is going to change.

Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something WRONG is something RIGHT. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole WORLD tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world-- --"No, YOU move.

But a broader—more scriptural—view of worship is about serving the poor, righting injustice, caring for those in need. When teenagers—whether they're already followers of Jesus or not—experience this kind of worship-in-action, they have an enormous opportunity to have a tangible experience of God in their lives.