By: Jehiely Balabarca
Sofia McDonald, an attorney with the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), spoke at Southern Adventist University’s Thursday convocation on Feb. 6, delivering an informative presentation on race, justice and the responsibility to address inequality.
McDonald is a graduate of Harvard College and was a special education teacher in Chicago before attending law school at New York University School of Law.
She said her work at the EJI, which is located in Montgomery, Alabama, spans a wide variety of cases involving Alabama death row, abusive conditions in Alabama prisons, and post-incarceration re-entry.
McDonald said, during her time as a teacher in Chicago, her classes almost entirely consisted of Black teenage boys, all of whom had been impacted in some way by mass incarceration. Her time there is when she began to understand the true impact of the criminal justice system on the Black community,which motivated her to go to law school.
“Having a mom or a dad in prison impacted my students’ academic performance, their behavior, whether they had to have a job outside of school [or] whether they had to take care of their siblings because a parent wasn’t it wasn’t in the home,” McDonald said.
White political leaders and decision-makers rely on the criminal justice system as the primary tool for maintaining racial hierarchy, McDonald further explained. She said black people are over-policed, disproportionately arrested, prosecuted, convicted and subjected to harsh sentences for the same kind of conduct as white people.
“Bureau of Justice Statistics data from 2001 predicted that one in three Black boys would serve jail or prison time in their lifetime,” McDonald said. “And in response, there was no emergency, no mobilization of experts as there was when the pandemic was declared. Instead, there was nothing.”
According to McDonald, that silence is prevalent. For her, it’s why systemic problems endure and actual change necessitates more than passive acknowledgment. As for incarceration rates, she said, “One in 57 white children has a parent who is incarcerated, while one in nine Black children has a parent who is incarcerated.”
