Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

by Bryan Stevenson

One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated.

Private prison builders and prison service companies have spent millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences, and keep more people locked up so that they can earn more profits.

Today we have the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The prison population has increased from 300,000 people in the early 1970s to 2.3 million people today. There are nearly six million people on probation or on parole. One in every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison; one in every three black male babies born in this century is expected to be incarcerated.

Private prison builders and prison service companies have spent millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences, and keep more people locked up so that they can earn more profits.

Fears of interracial sex and marriage have deep roots in the United States. The confluence of race and sex was a powerful force in dismantling Reconstruction after the Civil War, sustaining Jim Crow laws for a century and fueling divisive racial politics throughout the twentieth century. In the aftermath of slavery, the creation of a system of racial hierarchy and segregation was largely designed to prevent intimate relationships like Walter and Karen’s—relationships

It wasn’t until 1967 that the United States Supreme Court finally struck down anti-miscegenation statutes in Loving v. Virginia, but restrictions on interracial marriage persisted even after that landmark ruling. Alabama’s state constitution still prohibited the practice in 1986 when Walter met Karen Kelly. Section 102 of the state constitution read: The legislature shall never pass any law to authorise or legalise any marriage between any white person and a Negro or descendant of a Negro.

In poor urban neighborhoods across the United States, black and brown boys routinely have multiple encounters with the police. Even though many of these children have done nothing wrong, they are targeted by police, presumed guilty, and suspected by law enforcement of being dangerous or engaged in criminal activity. The random stops, questioning, and harassment dramatically increase the risk of arrest for petty crimes. Many of these children develop criminal records for behavior that more affluent children engage in with impunity.

My grandmother was the daughter of people who were enslaved. She was born in Virginia in the 1880s, after federal troops had been withdrawn and a reign of violence and terror had begun, designed to deny any political or social rights for African Americans. Her father told her stories of how the recently emancipated black people were essentially re-enslaved by former Confederate officers and soldiers, who used violence, intimidation, lynching, and peonage to keep African Americans subordinate and marginalized.

For a hundred years, any sign of black progress in the South could trigger a white reaction that would invariably invoke Confederate symbols and talk of resistance.

Confederate Memorial Day was declared a state holiday in Alabama at the turn of the century, soon after whites rewrote the state constitution to ensure white supremacy. (The holiday is still celebrated today.)

In the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights activism and new federal laws inspired the same resistance to racial progress and once again led to a spike in the use of Confederate imagery. In fact, it was in the 1950s, after racial segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education, that many Southern states erected Confederate flags atop their state government buildings. Confederate monuments, memorials, and imagery proliferated throughout the South during the Civil Rights Era.

Most people released from prison after being proved innocent receive no money, no assistance, no counseling—nothing from the state that wrongly imprisoned them.

There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.

Ponder

I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy.

Three different times I begged the Lord to take it away. Each time he said, “My grace is sufficient. My power is made perfect in your weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may work through me. Since I know it is all for Christ’s good, I am quite content with my weaknesses and with insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

The racial terrorism of lynching in many ways created the modern death penalty. America’s embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while assuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.

Convict leasing was introduced at the end of the nineteenth century to criminalize former slaves and convict them of nonsensical offenses so that freed men, women, and children could be “leased” to businesses and effectively forced back into slave labor. Private industries throughout the country made millions of dollars with free convict labor, while thousands of African Americans died in horrific work conditions. The practice of re-enslavement was so widespread in some states that it was characterized in a Pulitzer Prize–winning book by Douglas Blackmon as Slavery by Another Name. But the practice is not well known to most Americans.

Of course innocent mistakes occur, but the accumulated insults and indignations caused by racial presumptions are destructive in ways that are hard to measure. Constantly being suspected, accused, watched, doubted, distrusted, presumed guilty, and even feared is a burden borne by people of color that can’t be understood or confronted without a deeper conversation about our history of racial injustice.

I believe that there are four institutions… Alex Carp, “Walking with the Wind: Alex Carp Interviews Bryan Stevenson,” Guernica (March 17, 2014), available at www.guernicamag.com/​interviews/​walking-with-the-wind/, accessed April 30, 2014.

Research