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涤生 (Áhpi)
读过 Just Mercy
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Capital punishment means ‘them without the capital get the punishment.’ I had no right to expect anything from a condemned man on death row. Yet he gave me an astonishing measure of his humanity. In that moment, Henry altered something in my understanding of human potential, redemption, and hopefulness. It seemed that we were all cloaked in an unwelcome garment of racial difference that constrained, confined, and restricted us. Private profit has corrupted incentives to improve public safety, reduce the costs of mass incarceration, and most significantly, promote rehabilitation of the incarcerated. The privatization of prison health care, prison commerce, and a range of services has made mass incarceration a money-making windfall for a few and a costly nightmare for the rest of us. My work with the poor and the incarcerated has persuaded me that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. 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 that were, in fact, legally prohibited by “anti-miscegenation statutes” These aren’t my scars, cuts, and bruises. These are my medals of honor. twenty years after the civil rights revolution, the jury remained an institution largely unchanged by the legal requirements of racial integration and diversity. By the mid-1980s, nearly 20 percent of the people in jails and prisons in the United States had served in the military. Abstractions about capital punishment were one thing, but the details of systematically killing someone who is not a threat are completely different. In debates about the death penalty, I had started arguing that we would never think it was humane to pay someone to rape people convicted of rape or assault and abuse someone guilty of assault or abuse. Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity, the way that raping or abusing someone would. if we don’t expect more from each other, hope better for one another, and recover from the hurt we experience, we are surely doomed.” However, as Mozelle and Onzelle discovered, focusing on the status of the victim became one more way for the criminal justice system to disfavor some people. Poor and minority victims of crime experienced additional victimization by the system itself. The expansion of victims’ rights ultimately made formal what had always been true: Some victims are more protected and valued than others. America’s prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. We emphasized the incongruity of not allowing children to smoke, drink, vote, drive without restrictions, give blood, buy guns, and a range of other behaviors because of their well-recognized lack of maturity and judgment while simultaneously treating some of the most at-risk, neglected, and impaired children exactly the same as full-grown adults in the criminal justice system. We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. Our shared brokenness connected us. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.
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