“I’ve read The New Jim Crow twice,” Ronnie said. He’d also read lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s majestic Just Mercy, a memoir about his work against the racial bias and economic inequities inherent in the criminal justice system, which included efforts on behalf of falsely accused death row inmates. “It had me crying when I read it,” he said. These books we had both read challenged the tough-on-crime government narrative of the past forty years, one that fostered the shift in public spending from health and welfare programs to a massive system of incarceration, with a fivefold increase in
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