Black-led organizations are leading charge in reform of prisons and the death penalty 

Black-led organizations are working to stop the spread of legislation reinstating the death penalty, citing the outsized impact the punishment would have on Black incarcerated Americans. 

The effort is a response to a resurgence of legislation in states controlled by Republicans that seek to step up the use of the death penalty. 

In Tennessee, a law that would require execution to be carried out within 30 days of sentencing, limiting the possibility for appeals, is in the docks. In Florida, SB450 would require only eight out of 12 jurors to agree to a death sentence for it to be carried out while SB1342 would prevent the judge from reducing a jury’s death sentence to life in prison. Other states, including Illinois and New Jersey, are considering reinstating the death penalty. 

The groups pushing back against these efforts note they will disproportionately affect people of color. 

Since 1976, Black and Brown Americans have accounted for 43 percent of total executions, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Non-white Americans also make up 55 percent of incarcerated people currently awaiting execution. 

Jamila Hodge, executive director of Equal Justice USA, said there could be a few reasons for the renewed effort to bring back capital punishment, such as an uptick in gun violence and crime. But she also believes one of the contributing factors has been the spread of anti-Black rhetoric. 

“The rhetoric around race that has really permeated the last probably two or three years where anything that has to do with Black history or understanding the role of institutional racism is being attacked by certain political factions, and these are states where those factions are stronger,” Hodge told The Hill. 

Though Black people make up around 13 percent of the country’s population, they account for about 38 percent of jail and prison populations. Forty-one percent of death row inmates are Black. 

The death penalty has long faced debates in the U.S. In the Supreme Court’s 1972 Furman v. Georgia ruling, capital punishment was declared unconstitutional for violating cruel and unusual punishment laws because of the lack of consistency in who was given a death sentence and who was not. 

Over the next four years, 35 states wrote new laws on capital punishment. Despite this, the court would strike down the death penalty for crimes that did not result in death, including the 1977 Coker v. Georgia case in which the justices said the death penalty for the crime of raping an adult woman was unconstitutional. They would uphold this ruling in 2008, striking down the death penalty as punishment for raping a child. 

As time has gone on, support for the death penalty has fluctuated. About 60 percent of adults favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, according to Pew Research Center, but more than half of adults say Black people are more likely than whites to be sentenced to death for similar crimes. Another 63 percent don’t believe the death penalty deters people from committing serious crimes, and 78 percent worry about the risk that an innocent person will be executed.

“If the death penalty is reinstated, or if we start seeing it applied more, we can expect it’s going to be applied in a disproportionate way and that those are the same racial disparities that we have seen over years,” said Hodge. “My concern is it may even increase because the rhetoric lately has been so much stronger. We have to know that if we’re going to punish more, that it’s going to be disproportionately borne by Black and Brown communities.”

Twenty-seven states currently allow the death penalty, though multiple states including Arizona, Delaware and South Carolina have proposals that would abolish capital punishment. 

For states like Nebraska, where a 2015 vote repealed capital punishment, the death penalty may be voted back into law. And not all returning citizens can have a say in stopping this. 

In many states, returning citizens are barred from voting. The effects lead to difficulties with lobbying for change, said Topeka K. Sam, founder and executive director of Ladies of Hope Ministries. 

“Often what happens when you’re locking people out of, let’s say voting rights, then you’re not looking at the people who can’t vote because they won’t affect your candidacy,” said Sam. “That’s how a lot of lawmakers see it: ‘Why do I care? They can’t vote for me.’”

But in states where ex-convicts can vote, she added, these returning citizens aren’t always aware of their rights – and neither are their family members. 

“While there may be people who don’t know that they can vote once they’ve been released and are off of probation, their family members stopped voting because they don’t believe in the process,” she said. 

Sam is intimately familiar with the incarceration and parole systems. She was incarcerated in a federal prison until 2015, and she saw firsthand the difficulties both within and outside of prison walls. 

But it’s not just capital punishment that Black organizers like Sam are focused on. Part of ending the death penalty includes addressing a system that perpetuates high rates of recidivism. 

“Many of the women that I talked to, they were scared, they didn’t know where they would go,” said Sam. “Their husbands divorced them. They lost their children. Their parents or family passed away because they had been in prison for decades. They were going to be subjected to getting back in abusive relationships just to have a roof over their head or back into sex work just to survive.”

Some ​​3.7 million adults are under community supervision, according to the Prison Policy Initiative, with 2.9 million of those people on probation and around 800,000 on parole. Many of these individuals end up back incarcerated due to minor infractions, according to Robert Rooks, CEO of REFORM Alliance.

“Black people are more than twice as likely to be on probation, nearly four times as likely to be on parole as white people,” Rooks told The Hill. “Black people are more likely to have their parole revoked on a technical violation than their white counterparts – 50 percent of those technical violations are Black folks.”

Rook has known parolees returned to prison for staying out past curfew or even for something as small as making an illegal u-turn. Some have been returned for associating with others engaging in criminal activity.

While this sounds logical, Rooks points out that returning citizens often go back to the same neighborhoods they were arrested in, and those neighborhoods often have high rates of crime due to the lack of resources and investment. Therefore, the likelihood these parolees may associate with someone involved in crime is fairly high.

These stipulations add to the nearly 40,000 legal barriers that returning citizens face. Some of these barriers include limited job and educational opportunities, ineligibility for public benefits, including public housing, and even difficulties opening bank accounts.

“Most often, people are excluded and unbanked coming home from incarceration,” said Sam. “Seventy-five percent of all people who are released from prison will remain unemployed and unbanked for the first three years post incarceration, and that is also the timeframe of where people go back and where the recidivism rates are high.”

But others, Sam said, end up reincarcerated due to a lack of resources to help serious conditions like health issues. When an individual is released from prison, they’re given only a 30-day supply of medication they might be on. For some, this leads to a path fighting for survival, mental health episodes and the potential for substance misuse.  

That’s why organizations like EJUSA are working to steer the conversation away from punishment and instead spotlight what exactly these issues are – and why death won’t solve the problem. 

“People just assume we need the harshest punishment possible as a deterrent,” Hodge explained. “So if we think about a homicide, if we have the harshest penalty then that’s how we’re going to keep people from causing that level of harm, and it’s just not true.”

“What research does show is what will make people pause at the moment is fear of apprehension,” she added. “And so that’s why things like having street lights that are working in neighborhoods and keeping areas well lit, having spaces where people can be out and parks and green spaces maintained – all of those things will deter others.”

Advocates like Rook with REFORM are also calling for increased focus on community issues to address the root causes of incarceration: poverty, lack of opportunity, even health issues. 

“There are many reasons why someone ends up in a criminal justice system,” Rook said. “Something happened, broke down. They are dealing with perhaps substance abuse, mental health issues, or frankly, they could be poor and not have a place to stay. I think you not only just help the individual, but you help the community when you find out what those root causes are and then you start working to address them.”

Sam also wants to see more services available for those who have been released from incarceration. Ladies of Hope currently offers a range of services including access to education, training and health care.

These changes, Hodge said, will help adjust the carceral system to one based on rehabilitation.  

“In our culture, justice means punishment, so when we say we’re going to get justice for someone, even when it’s a police killing, what we usually are talking about is punishment, and we have to help people peel back that definition,” Hodge said.