I WAS RAISED IN THE SOUTH BRONX in the late 1980s and ’90s. I came of age and into my consciousness while a generation of men of color were herded into the criminal justice system under the rigid, unyielding habitual offender laws — three-strikes laws — for nonviolent drug-related offenses.
As shown in decades of analyses, the legacy of that policy that swept neighborhoods and entire cities clean of young men has been families broken apart, household incomes systematically gutted and swaths of urban spaces left vulnerable and bereft.
To me and other kids in neighborhoods like mine, the national dragnet on black and brown men and boys manifested itself daily: An older brother no longer there to walk one of our classmates to school because he was at Rikers awaiting trial. A neighbor child stuck alone in her apartment while her mom worked the night shift because her father had “gone upstate,” the common euphemism for someone sent to a state prison near the border with Canada. For us in the Bronx, it might as well have been Siberia.
[For more on this story by JULEYKA LANTIGUA WILLIAMS, go to https://www.themarshallproject...e-to-pay-reparations]
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