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According to the New York Law Journal, there have been 266 documented DNA exonerations nationwide, since DNA was first used over 20 years ago to exonerate innocent persons. In 2009, a Justice Task Force was created by Jonathan Lippman, Chief Judge of the State of New York, to help address the breadth of wrongful convictions. However, astoundingly (or perhaps not), none of the enumerated recommendations or acknowledgments by this task force address institutionalized racism, racial profiling, voter disenfranchisement, and the for-profit prison industrial criminal enterprise.

Here are some key, undisputed, tip-of-the-iceberg facts:

• The United States has the highest prison population in the world. With only 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. cages 25% of the world’s prison population.
• Over 2.4 million persons are in state or federal prisons and jails – a rate of 751 out of every 100,000. Another 5 million are under some sort of correctional supervision such as probation or parole.
• 1 in 31 adults is under correctional supervision and 1 in every 100 adults is in prison; 1 in every 100 black women; 1 in every 36 Latino adults; one in every 15 black men; and 1 in 9 black men ages 20 to 34 are incarcerated (notwithstanding the fact that African Americans nation-wide account for only 13% of the American population).
• African Americans, who are 13% of the population and 14% of drug users, are not only 37% of the people arrested for drugs but 56% of the people in state prisons for drug offenses.
• African American juvenile youth is but 16% of the population, they are 28% of juvenile arrests, 37% of the youth in juvenile jails and 58% of the youth sent to adult prisons.
• Approximately 250,000 juveniles — some sentenced to life without the possibility of parole at ages as young as 12 — are locked away in a legal system designed for adults.
• The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments were immediately subverted as the Slave Codes, which were transformed into Black Codes, followed by the transformation of plantations into prisons and convicts into “leased labor.”
• Homicide is the rarest of crimes, accounting for less than 1% of all crime. Nonetheless, it is important to note that between 50% -75% of all those imprisoned are incarcerated for a non-violent offense. (see e.g., “America’s One Million Nonviolent Prisoners” [pdf])
• “In the last decade, the punitive and overzealous tools and approaches of the modern criminal justice system have seeped into our schools, serving to remove children from mainstream educational environments and funnel them onto a one-way path toward prison. . . The School-to-Prison Pipeline is one of the most urgent challenges in education today.” (NAACP)
• Nationally, 1 in 3 Black and 1 in 6 Latino boys born in 2001 are at risk of imprisonment during their lifetime.




The Lippman Task Force also wrongfully presumes the criminal justice system is the panacea to “crime.” It also presumes crime is not a cultural, hegemonic construct. The Task Force does not even contemplate alternatives to incarceration.

Michelle Alexander on “The New Jim Crow”:






Documentary Preview: “Broken on All Sides”



From the filmmakers: “The project cen­ters around the the­ory put for­ward by many, and most recently by Michelle Alexan­der, that mass incar­cer­a­tion has become The New Jim Crow. That is, since the rise of the drug war and the explo­sion of the prison pop­u­la­tion, and because dis­cre­tion within the sys­tem allows for arrest and pros­e­cu­tion of peo­ple of color at alarm­ingly higher rates than whites, pris­ons and crim­i­nal penal­ties have become a new ver­sion of Jim Crow. Much of the dis­crim­i­na­tion that was legal in the Jim Crow era of seg­re­ga­tion is today ille­gal when applied to black peo­ple but per­fectly legal when applied to “crim­i­nals.” The prob­lem is that through con­scious and uncon­scious choices, black peo­ple have been tar­geted at sig­nif­i­cantly higher rates for arrest and pros­e­cu­tion. So, where does this leave crim­i­nal justice?”


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