Why Does Oklahoma Lead the World in Incarceration?
By John Thompson.
Former President Barack Obama recently recommended his short 2019 Black History Month reading list: It included classics by and about James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and Frederick Douglass; and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. The overflow crowd at Oklahoma Christian University’s Complex Dialogues with Bryan Stevenson would wholeheartedly agree with the recommendation. The bipartisan crowd left in awe, wrestling both with the reasons why Oklahoma is #1 in the world in locking up our fellow citizens, and what that says about us.
This first post will focus on what Stevenson said on February 18 at Oklahoma Christian University about our criminal justice system. A second post will discuss the role of the forum’s local advocates, liberals and conservatives from secular and religious backgrounds, who are committed to undoing the damage of mass incarceration.
Oklahoma and America have always had plenty of problems, with poverty being the origin of many of the most intransigent ones. Moreover, as late as 2010, the incarceration rate for black Oklahomans was nearly five times higher than for white Oklahomans. But Stevenson notes, “The opposite of poverty isn’t wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.” And he warns us, “Until we reckon with the trauma our society has caused to people of color and people in poverty, we cannot embrace the truth and heal.”
Our state and nation have long had a political and economic system which proves the maxim that “power corrupts” and our district attorney system shows how “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Across the U.S., Stevenson said, “We have a system of justice that treats you much better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent.” And the prison pipeline vividly illustrates the truth that, “Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.”
Years of litigation and research have taught Stevenson that “the closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it’s necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and – perhaps – we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
It is hard for this Oklahoman to acknowledge that we are a case study of how “fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn CONTINUE READING: Why Does Oklahoma Lead the World in Incarceration? - Living in Dialogue