Something very dangerous has happened here: we have let the people and the system thats supposed to protect our communities become a threat to some of them. This is not tenable in a democracy; you cannot have the men and women who carry guns be seen as enemies by so many of the people whose taxes pay their salaries. We are again entering a period in American politics where the criminal justice is a central issue. But this time, cops and prisons and sentencing laws arent the answer. Theyre being seen as the problem. And politicians on both sides of the aisle recognize it. Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat from Missouri, said in a statement that we need to de-militarize this situation — this kind of response by the police has become the problem instead of the solution. In a column for Time magazine, Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, wrote, given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them. Prominent politicians ranging from Rand Paul to Paul Ryan to Cory Booker to Dick Durbin to Mike Lee to Barack Obama have started putting forward reforms to the nations sentencing laws. When people are in prison, their skills and social networks deteriorate, wrote Ryan in his recent poverty report. And when they get out, certain laws and business practices make it even harder for them to find a job. In short, having a prison record makes it very difficult to move up the economic ladder. Minority men are much more likely to serve time and therefore feel the weight of these effects. A lot has gone wrong in our criminal justice system. Its time to fix it.
Posted on: Fri, 15 Aug 2014 21:03:10 +0000
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