By Jordan Costa, Photo: Celiafoto/Shutterstock, Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, March 2, 2022
The past couple of years have been some of the deadliest for many major U.S. cities. Murder rates have spiked and gun sales have surged.
We want the violence to stop. However, our chosen means of addressing violence prevention are shaped by who’s leading that conversation. Too often, the results of those discussions have tended to be punitive in nature, resulting in over-policing and mass incarceration.
Excessively punitive crime controls are reflected in stop-and-frisk practices, tough-on-crime imprisonment and other reprehensible policies that have fallen hardest on people of color. In addition to reflecting unequal treatment in policing and in the courts, driven by racial bias, those policies reflect a lack of empathy.
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