Education Not Incarceration: Rejecting the Criminalization of Communities of Color

“In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind… We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” 

– Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

 
More than 2 million people are held in jail, prison and detention in the United States. The Book of Resolutions of The United Methodist Church 2016 (Resolution 3379) notes that “from 1970 to 2009 the US prison population grew more than 700 percent” and “with only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States incarcerates 25 percent of all prisoners in the world.”

Read more from the United Methodist Women at this link.