KCC Reads Common Reading

>>> hi friends! -- plz note: the film just mercy available to screen for free for a month -- see under: https://www.justmercyfilm.com/ -- and note that the film only covers one major strand of the book -- the book is a broad expose of mass incarceration, the justice system, mass incarceration and the death penalty. it is required reading. but the film is good too in the absence of having read it. 👍

Just Mercy - Watch for Free Just Mercy - - Watch for Free

Wrongfully convicted man uses prison library to study law and have his conviction overturned Jarrett Adams was false imprisoned for a decade, but he used his time to study law at the prison's library before overturning his own conviction. Today, as a free man, he sets out to help others who had been wrongfully convicted.

apropos of Just Mercy:

>>> i just posted this on the women's march global page: Women's Marchers: I was outrageously impressed by the mobilization effort @ the school walkouts last week. We participated at my school @ CUNY. And, we have just had tragic news of another fatal shooting of one of our black sons, Stephon Clark, shot in his own backyard by the police who mistook his cell phone for a weapon, they say. We need to find a way to link these efforts, because they are of course linked social problems, and because one issue we have here in the states is that it is a lot easier to get Americans to care when the victims are white children. But when the victims are African American and Latino males, like Stephon Clark and the long lineup of murdered sons coming before him, similarly slain, the challenge is far more challenging, much harder to get people engaged on the mass scale we saw last week, not least of which because the perpetrators are policemen. The problem of gun violence, put on the radar and on the map so effectively by this group last week, and at other times and future times, I hope can be merged / allied with the problem of police brutality and in particular the tragic continuous issue of the mortality rates of our black sons -- just as we need to protect elementary and high school and college students from random shooters, we need to protect this group specifically from not just the guns owned by civilians who shouldn't have them but, sadly, from our own police forces. I will help obviously, and I hope that we can make something happen on this, together. as reported in today's NY Daily News:

Unarmed black man shot to death in own backyard Sacramento police fatally shot a 22-year-old black man holding a cell phone that was mistaken for a weapon.

>>> our keynote speaker talked about this campaign, the importance of it as the figure who establishes the framework for criminal justice in a place:

Candidates for Brooklyn District Attorney Seek to Set Themselves Apart Gotham Gazette is an online publication covering New York policy and politics as well as news on public safety, transportation, education, finance and more.