While on the South trip, the juniors visited the Equal Justice Initiative.

The goal of EJI is to end mass incarceration and excessive punishment which still occurs in the United States today. EJI wants to protect basic human rights “for the most vulnerable people in American society.” This organization focuses on four main issues: racial justice, children in prison, mass incarceration, and the death penalty.

In regards to racial justice, EJI wants to continue to strive for equal justice for the people of the United States, as “the United States has done very little to acknowledge the legacy of genocide, slavery, lynching, and racial segregation.” In order to pay respect and remember those who have lost their lives due to lynchings, EJI has announced a plan to build a museum

and a national lynching memorial. As of now, the organization has dozens of shelves lined with jars, which contain dirt from places where lynchings have occurred. Their hope in making this museum and memorial is to show the history of racial inequality.

The Equal Justice Initiative also focuses on the injustice which occurs to children in prisons. In 2005, the United States Supreme Court declared juvenile death sentences to be unconstitutional. Since then, EJI has focused on 3,000 children who are under 17 years of age and have been sentenced to imprisonment until death. EJI believes that this punishment is cruel and violates the 8th Amendment. Later, in 2012, the Supreme Court held that the life-without-parole sentence for children 17 years of age or younger is unconstitutional.

The organization also focuses on mass incarceration. America incarcerates more citizens than any other nation in the world. Due to this large number of people being imprisoned, America’s prisons have not been able to withstand this large amount of people. This has caused overcrowding and even tougher conditions inside of prisons. Not only are these prisons overcrowded, but they are often crowded with people who have been falsely accused. EJI states that there are “tens of thousands of false convictions each year across the country.” Some are falsely accused and do not even go to prison, but rather are faced with the death penalty. EJI  states that for every 9 people sentenced to death, 1 of them is innocent.

The Equal Justice Initiative states that the death penalty “is a direct descendant of lynching.”  Today, the group of people who are disproportionately faced with these cruel penalties are African Americans, thus showing that America today is still a place where race plays a large role in a person’s life.

The Equal Justice Initiative has made it their goal to help those who are falsely accused and to end injustice of all kinds. We too should make it our goal to help with these movements. For more information on how you can get involved, you can visit the EJI website.

Even though it is 2017, and we believe that we have come far from the injustices this country saw 70 years ago, there are still systemic injustices that we must fight against.
The Equal Justice Initiative has done inspiring work on this front; we should do the same.