Mass Incarceration

#yestoomanybrownMEN

Hashtag activism is futile.

Real activism has been taking place on the streets, in city council and in the state legislature. It also takes place in the HOME. Children do best with their fathers IN THE HOME..not in the prison system.

I would have never been so involved in issues related to widespread fatherlesness and it’s devastating effects unless I was dragged deep into the matrix of family court-due to circumstances beyond my control. The family court is one of the biggest players in the game.

Michelle Alexander who wrote the book The New Jim Crow was also skeptical of some of the things she read until she did her research and found out the truth.

Now, most of our media is seeing the light….

“The severity is evident in the devastation wrought on America’s poorest and least educated, destroying neighborhoods and families. From 1980 to 2000, the number of children with fathers in prison rose from 350,000 to 2.1 million. Since race and poverty overlap so significantly, the weight of our criminal justice experiment continues to fall overwhelmingly on communities of color, and particularly on young black men.

After prison, people are sent back to the impoverished places they came from, but are blocked from re-entering society. Often they cannot vote, get jobs, or receive public benefits like subsidized housing — all of which would improve their odds of staying out of trouble. This web of collateral consequences has created what the National Academy of Sciences report calls “a highly distinct political and legal universe for a large segment of the U.S. population.”

……

“The research is in, and it is uncontestable. The American experiment in mass incarceration has been a moral, legal, social, and economic disaster. It cannot end soon enough.”

Read the entire New York Times Op-Ed HERE:
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/opinion/sunday/end-mass-incarceration-now.html?referrer=