Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

We need to do better as a society, and understand that, yes, there are people in the system that deserve this kind of punishment, but a large majority of our prison population are just regular people… non-violent drug offenders like myself. There are plenty more, like me, that are capable of being responsible, productive, tax paying members of soci... See more

Jails, more and more, have become warehouses for people with mental illness. The stats sum it up: of the almost two million jail and prison inmates in the United States, almost three hundred thousand are people with serious mental illness. Twenty percent of these mentally ill inmates were homeless when they were incarcerated. Seventy-five percent o

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It is always painful for me, as it is for most prison chaplains, to see a man or a woman attacked so directly in the courtroom, all in an effort to pile as many collateral accusations on the defendant as possible, the implication being that he or she is intrinsically evil. It is difficult because we have come to know and love the person, perhaps ha

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Whites to be jailed for drug offenses. Nonviolent Black drug offenders remain in prisons for about the same length of time (58.7 months) as violent White criminals (61.7 months). In 2016, Black and Latinx people were still grossly overrepresented in the prison population at 56 percent, double their percentage of the U.S. adult population. White peo

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