Special to the AFRO
Maryland’s criminal system has long operated like an engine built to run roughshod over Black lives, and the data makes that plain: Black people represent roughly 30 percent of the state’s population but make up about 71 percent of those behind bars. That imbalance is a monument to deep-seated structural policies and practices to cage and cripple the Black community.
In a state that birthed Harriet Tubman and raised Thurgood Marshall, the punishment for pursuing our liberation continues today. In spite of Black leadership at the highest positions we have continued for decades to decimate Black families in the name of criminal justice and seem to think that modest tinkering of the system is sufficient to fix a system…