Strange Fruit

“When the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man’s conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims.”--W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) That's how philosophy professor Dr. Brady Heiner opens his article, The Procedural Entrapment of Mass Incarceration:Prosecution, Race, and the Unfinished Project of American Abolition. The passage from 1903 seems eerily informed by today's mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and the over-policing of black neighborhoods. Dr. Brady HeinerUniversity of California Fullerton Dr. Brady Heiner We've talked before about how African Americans and Latinos and over-represented in the prison population, and th