Dominique DuBois Gilliard - Rethinking Incarceration: Advocating for Justice That Restores

I MUST CONFESS THAT I STRUGGLED writing this book. Throughout the process I experienced a deep, lingering dissonance. My unrest emanated from knowing that mass incarceration is decimating communities, and yet I feltat timesas if it is not the most urgent issue facing us today. Amid a racial nadir, it has been arduous investing my time, emotions, and heart in a project that does not explicitly name the elephant in the room. To write a book that does not explicitly address police brutality; the copious number of unarmed black, brown, and native lives lost to it; and the xenophobia spreading throughout our nation like a cancer felt disingenuous and unfaithful.

These are perilous times! I, along with much of the African American community, am living in a perpetual state of trauma resonant of this haunting line from Hamilton: I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory / When is it gonna get me? I lose sleep contemplating this question. I feel paralyzed by its gravity, particularly as I pray for family members with cognitive impairments. The stress, strain, and anxiety of feeling as if there is a target on your back is debilitating. While composing this book, I repeatedly found myself paralyzed by trauma, unable to muster meaningful words. In those moments, even the most mundane tasks proved to be unbearable.

Between the World and Meis an evocative letter written by Ta-Nehisi Coates to his son about the dystopian reality of growing up black in the United States. Coates, paralleling his own experience to his sons, writes,

The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with a club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.