Why Mass Incarceration Defines Us As a Society by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Originally published at Smithsonian Magazine, December 2012 issue
November 21, 2012

Image by Dandelion Salad via Flickr

Bryan Stevenson, the winner of the Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award in social justice, has taken his fight all the way to the Supreme Court

It is late in the afternoon in Montgomery. The banks of the Alabama River are largely deserted. Bryan Stevenson and I walk slowly up the cobblestones from the expanse of the river into the city. We pass through a small, gloomy tunnel beneath some railway tracks, climb a slight incline and stand at the head of Commerce Street, which runs into the heart of Alabama’s capital. The walk was one of the most notorious in the antebellum South.

Bill Moyers Journal: Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander + Inequality

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Bill Moyers Journal
April 02, 2010

Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander

In the months before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had expanded his focus on racial justice to include reducing economic inequality. On this week’s 42nd anniversary of King’s assassination, Bill Moyers sits down with attorneys Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander to discuss how far we’ve really come as a country, how poor and working class Americans have been falling behind and what America must do to fulfill Dr. King’s vision.