“Justice (Noun): The ideal of righteousness, fairness, and impartiality, especially with regard to the punishment of wrongdoing.” 

Every man in prison is intimately acquainted with the concept of justice. Every day, the notion of it invades our personal space, much like an illness. The system, which buries us beneath mountains of razor-wire and granite, bases its legitimacy to punish on the dictates of justice.  Justice, like the blood of Abel, slain by his brother Cain, cries out with hunger pangs. For the crimes of armed robbery and murder, which I committed when I was only 18, justice demanded I receive a life sentence. And justice got its just deserts. 

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Applied justice in the United States could not be a more hideous, wretched, and ignoble thing. Justice, specifically criminal justice, has overseen, for example, a disproportionate number of minorities sentenced to death. It has ushered in the mass surveillance and targeting of whole generations, along with the erection of a “gulag archipelago” more gargantuan in scope than anything the Communist regimes in Russia, East Germany, or China could ever chain together. 

When my friends and I go to the yard to play basketball, we see faces mostly black and brown and barely any white. We can’t help but wonder if, all along, justice was just for us. Our skewed worldview of justice has been shaped more by what it takes than by what it claims to give. The irony of the criminal justice system is that it’s designed to procure justice from the unjust. It is justice they themselves have mostly been denied. There is a neglected nexus between criminal justice and social justice. In truth, social injustice creates the kinds of people who become prime candidates for criminal justice.

Social injustice is a common thread that runs through the mosaic of men who live in prison. Their origin stories, much like my own, are rife with episodes of discrimination, deprivation, and degradation regarding housing, jobs, and education. These conditions have so disadvantaged communities of color, multi-generationally, that it has created a type of American caste system, inescapable and inevitable. 

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When a state does not render justice to members of its most resource-vulnerable population, it becomes an accomplice to injustice. In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. famously writes, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” His statement is a commentary on the “interrelatedness of people everywhere,” and his belief that “whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”  Justice, in this respect, is therefore an ideal. It is an ecosystem, one that perpetually requires equilibrium to remain harmonious. When an imbalance of justice arises in this ecosystem, the consequences are unforeseen and harsh corrective measures will be taken to restore balance.

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With fervent desire, I look forward to the day when the ecosystem of justice is so balanced, our prisons are empty, and our playgrounds are full.