Read on Twitter
THREAD 
The notion that a vast gulf exists between ‘criminals’ & people who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about ‘them’
The notion that a vast gulf exists between ‘criminals’ & people who have never served time in prison is a fiction created by the racial ideology that birthed mass incarceration, namely that there is something fundamentally wrong and morally inferior about ‘them’
The reality is that all of us have done wrong. Studies suggest that most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. That many people in the UK break the law not once but repeatedly throughout our lives.
Yet only some of us will be arrested, charged, convicted of a crime, branded a criminal and ushered into a permanent undercaste.
Who becomes a social pariah and excommunicated from civil society and who trots off to college bears scant relationship to the morality of the crimes committed. Who is more blameworthy: the young asian kid who hustles on the streets, selling weed to help his mother pay rent?
Or the white college kid who deals drugs out of his dorm room so that he'll have cash to finance his spring break? Who should we fear? The kid in the 'hood’ who joined a gang and now carries a gun for security, because his neighborhood is frightening and unsafe?
Or the high school student who has a drinking problem but keeps getting behind the wheel?
Our racially biased system of mass incarceration exploits the fact that all people break the law and make mistakes at various points in their lives with varying degrees of justification. Failing to live by one's highest ideals and values, is part of what makes us human.
