Bryan Stevenson
Bryan Stevenson
Bryan A. Stevensonis an American lawyer, social justice activist, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and a clinical professor at New York University School of Law. Stevenson has gained national acclaim for his work challenging bias against the poor and minorities in the criminal justice system. Stevenson has assisted in securing relief for dozens of condemned prisoners, advocated for poor people and developed community-based reform litigation aimed at improving the administration of criminal justice...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionActivist
CountryUnited States of America
Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.
We all have a responsibility to create a just society
Whenever society begins to create policies and laws rooted in fear and anger, there will be abuse and injustice.
The Bureau of Justice reports that one in three black male babies born this century will go to jail or prison - that is an absolutely astonishing statistic. And it ought to be terrorizing to not just to people of color, but to all of us.
We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.
Each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done.
Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet.
The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.
The true measure of our character is how we treat the poor, the disfavored, the accused, the incarcerated, and the condemned.
In many ways, we’ve been taught to think that the real question is, ‘Do people deserve to die for the crimes they’ve committed?’ And that’s a very sensible question. But there’s another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it is not ‘Do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit?’ but ‘Do we deserve to kill?’
You don’t change the world with the ideas in your mind, but with the conviction in your heart.
We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state, a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn ourselves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarceration and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it's necessary to recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and-perhaps-we all need some measure of unmerited grace.
You ultimately judge the civility of a society not by how it treats the rich, the powerful, the protected and the highly esteemed, but by how it treats the poor, the disfavored and the disadvantaged....