Member-only story
How Black Lives Are Undervalued
It is official policy in America
As a law school student, I interned at the D.C. Parole Board. I spent the entire summer of my internship sifting through files of Black men who had been denied parole. A lawsuit had been filed and was successful in casting doubt on the process of parole.
Was the process fair to the parolees? Had individuals incarcerated been allowed to spend unnecessary time in the system (in a facility or on parole)? And in these cases, what was the justification for this?
It was readily apparent as the lawsuit proceeded there was a very cavalier approach to the Black men incarcerated in the local prison system. Their lives were not valuable. They were treated as if they were less than human.
Individuals who likely should have been paroled and let out of the system remained in the system for over a decade for small offenses. Black men might get sentenced to 18 months but spend years working off a sentence that was originally possession of a small quantity of narcotics.
As I flipped through the files, I did notice another fact over and over: the vast majority of the individuals did not finish high school and/or had a learning disability. It was striking.
