In my last and final installment of the systemic injustice’s, I will be speaking about an article that I read recently about 4998 people that died in U.S jails without getting an established day in court. In the article, it opens up with the story of Harvey Hill, who was suspected of needing a mental evaluation for how he was acting but was instead jailed for a misdemeanor offense that put him in prison. Afterwards, he was beaten in jail many times by the guards, pepper sprayed, kicked and many other terrible things until he was taken to his cell and let out of his restraints and eventually died. This goes against one of the key principles in play when someone is jailed and awaiting a sentence, innocent until proven guilty. So where is the injustice? It is the fact that many people are dying in jails without having an established court date to trial them for their crimes, and this data is not public to the people for them to know how these individuals died. The major impact of this is the fact that many of these people dying are those who committed a small time offense and are effectively being sentenced to a death sentence without having a chance for their crime to be evaluated. The major form of identity in play would be socioeconomic class, as those who are in jail like this to be sentenced for things like theft and such, are likely going to be more poor than other people. The main way for this to become right is to establish a better system for mentally ill patients, devote more money to jails and make this more public accessible data.
When it comes to this class, something that I think of when I was writing this injustice was the reading we did, March. The reason for this is because, in March when John Lewis and many were beaten by people despite doing something as simple as a nonviolent protest. Similar to Harvey Hill, who I outlined in this reading, who despite doing a very small crime, was beaten and killed, displaying issues that are still present in the world today, police brutality and many issues amongst the justice system.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-jails-deaths/