Caught in a System Designed to Keep us Bound: Caught in a System Designed to Keep us Bound

By Mr Martin Jongu'e' Sr.

The Criminal Justice System Is Not Broken, It's Doing Exactly What It's Meant to Do. Our criminal justice system works exactly as designed. Its original purpose was to incarcerate poor men of color, which the criminal justice system does with painful intensity. This system remains designed to disenfranchise, harm, and incarcerate people of color. That must change. Today when people speak of a broken criminal justice system, we ignore that our current criminal justice system was created to incarcerate Blacks, perpetuate systems of oppression, and maintain political disenfranchisement. Our system is not broken. It does all of that beautifully. There is a revealed connection between racial oppression and incarceration when saying that there are more Black men in prison now than were enslaved in 1850. A racist criminal justice system purposefully harms communities of color and hurts all Americans. Our criminal justice system continues to live up to its original purpose, racial oppression. And, reforming the criminal justice system enables us to maintain that system once based on, and still resulting in racially motivated disenfranchisement. Reform simply sanitizes the aspects of the system we do not want to see. We feel better, but the system is not better. To change the intention of racial oppression we need a completely different paradigm, such as arestorative justice model. If we truly want a system reflecting this country's value of justice, if we truly want less "collateral damage" in the form of violence, poverty, and family fragmentation, if we truly want a country built on racial equality, then we cannot simply reform the criminal justice system. We must dismantle it.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1516857844
• ISBN13: 9781516857845
• Release Date: June 2015
• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.5" x 0.5" x 4.5"