NJ must live up to Dr. King’s legacy and end racial disparity in our justice system | Opinion

By Yannick Wood

Fifty-five years ago this March, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited the City of Newark to promote the Poor People’s Campaign. Eight days later, he was dead – assassinated on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tenn.

As we mark Dr. King’s birthday this weekend, Newark – and all of New Jersey – continue, despite our progress, to suffer from some of the same racial injustices that existed on the day of Dr. King’s visit.

During our modern-day “racial reckoning” just two years ago, the nation had its eyes focused on this enduring challenge. While sparked by the murder of George Floyd, the outcry became a clarion call to finally address the overall structural racism that causes America’s racial inequities – some of the worst of which are found in New Jersey.

And then the moment passed – and it became incumbent upon us to turn the moment into a movement, a newly invigorated continuation of Dr. King’s civil rights fight.

New Jersey, in many respects, is failing that challenge.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the area of criminal justice, where many public officials have fallen right back into the old worn-out groove of knee-jerk “tough on crime” policies that are often unfounded in fact, unlikely to work – and structurally designed to devastate our Black and Brown youth and adults.

For example, legislators are currently proposing bills that will roll back New Jersey’s successful bail reform, which has been a model for the rest of the country. Our old system of bail meant that people of lower means – often people of color – were disproportionately locked up before their trials and before being found guilty (or not) of anything, while their wealthier white counterparts were set free.

When the state reformed this system, it eliminated cash bail for criminal offenses and created a system where judges, in select instances, could still detain people pre-trial. Notably, overall crime in New Jersey, which had been decreasing prior to bail reform’s implementation in 2017, continued to plummet in the subsequent years.

Yet legislators today, based on a false narrative that crime in New Jersey is uniformly increasing, want to once again make it easier to detain more people before trial, going down the tired road of over-incarceration and community devastation.

The fact is that “violent crime” in New Jersey’s cities like Newark and Trenton has decreased. Yet we are seeing bills like S3347 and S3385 which, if enacted, will increase pre-trial detention at a time when New Jersey’s courts are dealing with backlogs and bail reform is actually working to ensure that 97% of released defendants make court appearances. These bills will likely exacerbate the racial disparities in New Jersey’s jails where 60% of detained individuals are Black.

Other proposed legislation like S3006 and S3028 would create mandatory prison provisions for both youth and adults convicted of specified auto crime bills. While car theft is certainly serious and a violation of personal security, auto crime rates are actually decreasing after rising in the previous year.

But regardless of crime rates, bills like these would likely not deter crime, would remove discretion from judges to evaluate the specific circumstances of a case, and would incarcerate more people of color in a system where both adult and youth prisons already have the worst racial disparities in the nation.

It’s time we finally learned that we cannot over-incarcerate our way out of behavior that is largely born from structural deficiencies in opportunity and investment. That means prioritizing creative policies that invest in infrastructure and programs to prevent adults and youth from engaging in harmful behaviors in the first place. And it means investing in diversion programs that steer young people who have already been arrested away from prosecution and into programs that target mental and behavioral health issues.

Finally, when proposing any new criminal justice legislation, New Jersey must comply with the law requiring a racial and ethnic impact statement (REIS) if the bill impacts “pretrial detention, sentencing, probation or parole policies concerning adults and juveniles.” Lawmakers routinely and illegally ignore this requirement, as has been the case with the recently proposed bills.

In his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King said, “I am sure that each of you would want to go beyond the superficial social analyst who looks merely at effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.”

On what would be his 94th birthday, let’s finally heed that call.

Yannick Wood is a former prosecutor and the current director of the Criminal Justice Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.

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