Introduction/summary
Speaker from Alabama
Brian Stevenson, grew up with exposure to slavery founder + executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative
Childhood

I viewed the TED Talk given by Bryan Stevenson, who, along with having second-hand experience with slavery and its victims while growing up in the deep south, is the founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, an organization whose focus is to combat discrimination within the justice system but also strives to lower prison populations, reduce sentences for nonviolent offenders, and abrogate capital punishment. The topic of his presentation is a call to action against the current divergence of equal justice by race and wealth and is accomplished with a strong statistical basis and a punctuation of anecdotes from his childhood and early career that highlight his experience in dealing with discrimination.

Something I learned
1972, 300000 people imprisoned, now 2.3 million, 7 million on probation/parole
⅓ black men is in jail or parole
34% of African americans cannot vote in Alabama
Life in prison for kids
1 out of 9 people on death row are innocent
California spends $1b on death row per annum
11x more …show more content…
I had not been aware of the sheer proportion of our population that is currently imprisoned and, in particular, the number of whom are African American. According to Stevenson, more than 2.3 million Americans are serving sentences with another 7 million on parole or probation. //Insert proportion of African Americans More alarming to me than that, however, is how Stevenson described how certain states have potentially used this //proportion to manipulate their voter demographic. For example, in Stevenson’s home state of Alabama, 34% of the adult, male, African American population is not able to vote, which creates a severe under representation of their