Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy is a book about “getting closer to mass incarceration and extreme punishment in America”—a memoir of his early years as a lawyer for death row inmates in the Deep South, and the trajectory that eventually leads him to broaden the scope of his work to include wrongly imprisoned individuals across the country. In the wake of events in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere over the past year, this book is more relevant now than ever. Through his story, Stevenson offers Americans a compelling challenge, rooted in love: to look critically at our history of racial oppression and to rethink our criminal “justice” system in light of the ways in which that historical violence has bled through and continues to deform that system today.
The story follows Stevenson from Harvard Law School to an internship with a legal aid nonprofit in Alabama where he is confronted for the first time with real people facing the death penalty. After graduation, he returns to Alabama to continue advocating for innocent men on death row, and over the next several years goes on to discover just how widespread the dysfunction, corruption, and injustice in the American legal system really are. Stevenson’s legal work expands over time to include advocacy for children who have been sentenced to die in prison, and “lifers” or death row inmates whose intellectual disabilities, mental illness, and traumatic histories were not taken into account during their trials. The common thread between all of these individuals is that race and poverty have made them unable to defend themselves in the legal system: they are powerless to resist wrongful imprisonment and extreme punishment.
Stevenson gives historical and statistical context to the personal narratives he tells, presenting them not as mere anecdotes, but as powerful, symbolic examples of a larger whole. He writes that the United States has the highest incarceration rate of anywhere in the world: 2.3 million people are in prison, and another six million are on probation or parole. A quarter of a million American children—some as young as twelve—have been sent to adult jails and prisons where almost 3,000 of them are serving life sentences. Furthermore, many people are imprisoned for nonviolent crimes. “Writing a bad check or committing a petty theft” can result in decades of prison time or even life imprisonment, and there are now “more than a half million people in state or federal prisons for drug offenses.”
People of color make up the vast majority of the prison population, and Stevenson describes the way that mass incarceration continues the racial terrorism of the Jim Crow era into the twenty-first century, impacting racial minorities in much the same way as did segregation laws in the early twentieth century (Michelle Alexander makes the same point in her 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness). Justice Bureau statistics show that black men are four times more likely than whites to be shot by police. Black and Hispanic youth in urban poor neighborhoods face “random stops, questioning, and harassment” from police which increase risk of arrest for petty crimes and often result in criminal records “for behavior that more affluent children engage in with impunity.” The results of this racial discrimination in police work and the court system are clear: “one of every fifteen people born in the United States in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison,” but among black males, that number is one in three.
Parts of Stevenson’s book read like the suspenseful courtroom scenes of a crime thriller. In recounting the stories of people like Walter McMillian, a black man framed by local law enforcement in Alabama for the murder of a young white woman, Stevenson draws the reader into the unfolding drama through descriptions of tense days in court, emotional dialogues with McMillian’s family, and heated confrontations with corrupt officials.
Throughout Just Mercy, vivid character development restores names and faces to the children, women, and men whose suffering is ordinarily hidden from view within the prison system: the grief-stricken man who is executed before Stevenson’s eyes, the terrified young teenager serving a life sentence for shooting his mother’s abuser, the loving mother of six who is incarcerated for capital murder after a medical examiner falsely asserts that her stillborn baby was born alive. In these heartbreaking pages, readers encounter not only tragedy and injustice, but individuals who have maintained hope, resilience, and compassion in the midst of it all.
Yet Just Mercy does more than simply relate the facts, or tell a good story. It digs down to the heart of the issue, examining the deeper psychological and spiritual reasons that we as a society have supported and allowed mass incarceration and harsh punishment for the most vulnerable people in our midst.
Reflecting on the brokenness he has discovered in himself through his personal involvement with the poor and the incarcerated, Stevenson writes, “So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken… we’ve legalized vengeful and cruel punishments… we’ve allowed our victimization to justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible.”
Stevenson has learned from his years of working to reform the legal system that “each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” He asserts that “we are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated,” and the only way to reclaim our humanity is to realize “that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—perhaps—we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”
Just Mercy is an invitation for all of us to do the kind of honest soul-searching that will uncover this vulnerable, flawed humanity, and to refuse to comply any longer with a system that denies it.