Justice system fails people in poverty
I recently volunteered with the Freedom Day Bailout project. What I learned made me irate.
There are people who have been in jail for many months, ostensibly because of relatively minor charges such as shoplifting. I say “ostensibly” because they are really incarcerated because they could not make bail. People were locked up for six or eight months because they could not pay the bondsman’s fee for a $5,000 bail. One man whose bail was only $1,000 had been in jail for 420 days.
None of these people had been convicted of the crime charged. They were in jail simply because they did not have the ability to pay their bail. They were in jail for the crime of poverty.
LARRY AUERBACH, ATLANTA
Confederate monuments perpetuate white supremacy
The latest front in GOP culture wars is Confederate monuments. Republican politicians’ glorification of these eyesores is unpatriotic and dangerous.
Patriotism requires us to confront history honestly – not whitewash it to pander to the anti-woke mob.
Confederate leaders stated explicitly that they were fighting to make slavery and white supremacy eternal. After Appomattox, former Confederates used terrorism to reverse Reconstruction and re-subjugate Blacks.
Ever since, Confederate monuments have been one more cudgel to pummel Blacks into submission. These monuments were erected at moments when white power was being reimposed or challenged. Their primary purpose was always not to memorialize the past but to perpetuate white supremacy into the future.
GOP politicians who peddle sanitized neo-Confederate fairy tales are condemning us to keep reliving ugly history. The same ideology that drove Confederate insurrectionists to reject Lincoln’s election drove MAGA insurrectionists to reject Biden’s. The same ideology that incited John Wilkes Booth incited Dylann Roof.
In 2023, as in 1861, white supremacy is toxic to American democracy.
STEVE BABB, LAWRENCEVILLE
