ROJ Trainer Brenda Zook Friesen has a connection to an inmate at this immigration prison, run by for-profit company GEO Group. Prisoners, detained for not having immigrations papers, are protesting deportation policies as well as inhumane conditions at the prison. A hunger strike started a couple weeks ago, peaked at 750 prisoners, with two remaining strikers. The strike has also spread to a Texas immigration prison, run by the GEO Group.

Your support of Roots of Justice makes possible the story that Dawn Longenecker tells in this video. The young adults in the Discipleship Year program that Dawn directs leave their year of service having attended ROJ’s Damascus Road Antiracism Analysis Training and take what they’ve learned into their next positions. As Dawn says, “It’s exciting!”

Your gift of $25 will help pass on this important message of justice to new generations of participants. You can be part of this exiting work.

Call it “church empires,” “urban colonization,” “urban church plantations,” or “Walmart churches,” this sort of “ministry” (so-called) has been around a long time and needs to stop.

You’ve probably heard it before: “I would have said that even if [fill in the person’s name] was white.” It’s a tried and true method of distancing oneself from actions that are based on white superiority. I know this, because I’ve used it, and hear others use it. Typically, it is white people who employ this technique, and I’d like to apply some analysis to the dynamic. (I won’t claim that people of color never use this distancing method, though if they do, there is a different dynamic going on and it’s not appropriate for me, as a white person, to analyze that dynamic.)

In case you weren’t sure, there are still serious racial disparities throughout the entire criminal justice process in the United States. One thing this infographic doesn’t touch on is the numbers of people who never make it into the criminal justice process because they were killed by officers before they even had the chance to be wrongfully arrested. (Sean Bell, Oscar Grant, ….)

Courtesy of ArrestRecords.com