“I was 29. I had just been elected to the Central Ward council seat in an upset. I had beaten an incumbent who was more than 40 years my senior and had held the seat for 16 years. I was a year out of law school, where I had spent a lot of time sitting in classes—but not like this one. Those classes were in ivy-covered buildings, modern and comfortable, with very few black men. Those classes did not fully explore how the broken legal system damages communities such as Newark. I felt that every law-school student should see rooms like that one in the Willie T. Wright Apartments—that America should see.”
“I was holding the free clinic to help men learn how to expunge their records. Expungement, in the criminal-justice sense, means to clear one’s record.”
“I hoped to help give the men in that basement a clean slate, to help them break out of what Michelle Alexander calls the “American caste system,” in which they were judged by their criminal past. Rather, I wanted them to be judged only by their promise and their determination to work hard and play by the rules.”
“Some agonized about how it seemed like the system wanted them to do something wrong because it was providing no options for them to do something right.”
“The war on drugs has turned out to be a war on people—and far too often a war on people of color and the poor.”