Week 42: Just Mercy

This week's book:
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
By Bryan Stevenson

This week's book was for book group. We have read a lot of depressing as hell books this year and this week's book was no different. I am going to be honest here, it took me a couple of weeks to finish the book. It's only about three hundred pages, but every time I picked it up I would put it down after a few pages.

The book was written by one of the most influential lawyers in the United States of the last thirty or so years. He has worked on getting people off of death row who were either wrongly charged or received too much prison time for the crimes they commited. The book definitely had one major case he was working on but it was filled with all of these other little vignettes of all of these people who were wrongly charged for crimes that they either didn't commit or were one of many people involved with the crime. There were also many cases of children with ages as young as thirteen being sent to adult prisons for life for nonviolent crimes.

A fellow book group member and I agreed that the book depressed us greatly. The couple that lead discussion (and brought the snacks as well) spoke about how the book didn't make them sad, it angered them. It spoke about how young African American males have such a higher rate of being incarcerated than anyone else. The book also discussed that through the 1990’s until the early 2000’s, prisons were for profit, so more and more people were being sent to prison for smaller crimes for longer periods of time.

The lawyer has worked very long and got a lot of people off of death row. He along with his team has gotten some laws changed so minors can't be put on to death row for nonviolent crimes. Also minors shouldn't have life in prison for small crimes. But one of the biggest changes he was able to do was that he made it so different states can't execute minors or a mentally ill person.

During our discussion, our book group was discussing how we need to make a difference about how people in prison are treated in and after they have served their time. In theory it sound like a great idea but I wouldn't even know where to start. Our church has started a program were we have started helping people on parole, which is great, but I'm not sure what else can we do. I would love if people would start making better choices or no one would ever be in a situations where nothing negative happened, but that isn't the state of the world. I was left after finally finishing the book feeling devastated that the world is crap. I finished the book in bed last Friday night. I was alone that night with the kids because my husband was having a fun night with his two older brothers. I was taking a break from the book to check out Facebook (kinda mentally check out) and all these reports were coming in about the school shooting. It was all too much.

Perhaps if I was in a better head space when I was trying to read this book I could have enjoyed it more, or had a drive to help. I have had a hard time recently and I just don't have enough energy to join a cause that I fear isn't ever going to change. The book was very well written and I would recommend it if you need a new cause to dive into. If you are a stay at home mom trying to make it through having a sick baby and a little guy having a hard time with his kindergarten teacher, then I would not recommend it.