Lawyer, professor and human rights activist Bryan Stevenson brought some audience members on Monday afternoon to tears as used personal stories to advocate that the American criminal justice system reevaluate how it tries juveniles. The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an Alabama-based organization that promotes human rights and social justice on behalf of groups such as children and the mentally ill, Stevenson spoke to a crowd of roughly 200 students and faculty about stories of adolescents in the South who are sentenced to life prison, which he said is an “inhumane” punishment for children. He said juvenile criminals often come from broken households or abusive families, so they need protection rather than severe punishment.
“We live in an era when our political leadership has engaged in a politics of fear and anger,” Stevenson said, “and this has led to policies such as mass incarceration; policies that have forever altered the mindset of American society.” In the 1980s, Stevenson said, people began thinking of underprivileged children from broken households as “super predators” — products of “social decay” who are likely to harm others. He said the spread of this fear led states to enact changes between 1989 until 1994 that allowed children to be tried as adults. He added that 90 percent of children sentenced to life in prison for non-homicide offenses come from African-American and Latino families.
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