5 Ways To Talk About Criminal Justice Reform At Your Family Gathering

At the heart of any gathering is the idea that we all deserve a seat at the table and a chance to be heard. The truth is, though, that in America, some voices are NOT heard. And there are 2.3 million people behind bars in this country who can’t get a seat at the table. No other nation on earth locks up so many of its people—the US has 5% of the world’s population, but a hard-to-believe 25% of the world’s incarcerated population. The racial bias baked right into the system makes a terrible situation even worse: While Black Americans make up 13% of the population, they represent 40% of the incarcerated population. Our communities and our country suffer when so many of our friends, neighbors, and family members have no voice.

Look around the table—there’s a good chance that someone there has been caught up in the criminal justice system. Thanks to mass incarceration, 50% of Americans have family members who’ve been incarcerated and 6.5 million of us have an immediate family member in jail or prison at this very moment. (Black people are 50% more likely than white people to have an incarcerated family member.) It’s hard for anyone to cope with having a family member behind bars, but the private companies profiting from mass incarceration make things nightmarish for low-income families, who often have to choose between paying the bills and helping out their loved ones. Does this look or feel like justice to anyone?

OK, here’s one we all can agree on: Kids should have fun and feel safe and supported in school. Lots of kids do feel that way! But many students of color experience school in ways that are very different from their white peers. Here’s the truth: Black students are twice as likely to be arrested or referred to law enforcement as white students. Black students also routinely receive harsher punishments for the same or similar offenses. Overpolicing our schools doesn’t make our kids any safer—it only gets them tangled up in the criminal justice system at an early age. Let’s let kids be kids.

Doesn’t locking people up make us safe? No. The thing is, a lot of those 2.3 million incarcerated Americans we talked about earlier—hundreds of thousands of them—haven’t been convicted of a crime. They’re there because they can’t afford bail. Many others are there only because the criminal justice system is racist—Black men receive longer sentences than white men who are convicted of the exact same crime. Look, we spend $182 billion (BILLION) a year on mass incarceration—if we want to truly be safe, then we should invest that money in people, in creating jobs and improving childcare and health care and other community services, not jails and prisons.

Don’t fear the family dinner! No matter how much we may disagree, there’s always more that unites us than divides us. If we listen to each other with an open mind, if we speak to each other honestly and respectfully, then we can start to come together. Not just as a family, or as a group of friends, but as a community—and, ultimately, as a country.