Chris Hedges Quote

Many of the urban poor have been crippled and broken by a rewriting of laws, especially drug laws, that has permitted courts, probation officers, parole boards, and police to randomly seize poor people of color, especially African American men, without just cause and lock them in cages for years. In many of our most impoverished urban centers— our internal colonies, as Malcom X called them— mobilization will be difficult. Many African Americans, especially the urban poor, are in prison, on probation, or living under some kind of legal restraint. Charges can be stacked against them, and they have little hope for redress in the courts, especially as 97 percent of all federal cases and 94 percent of all state cases are resolved by guilty pleas rather than trials. A New York Times editorial recently said that the pressure employed by state and federal prosecutors to make defendants accept guilty pleas, which often include waiving the right to appeal to a higher court, is closer to coercion than to bargaining.