Published March 09. 2021 2:56PM
Bill Stanley, Special to The Times
At a time when racial justice is a, if not the, top priority in many American communities of various sizes, a number of those same communities have been torn apart by racial strife.
With one side prone to violence and destruction to vent its anger and the other side either over-responding with its own violence or, worse, doing nothing at all, divisions that should be healing only get worse.
We’ve heard the extremes such as defund the police and, from the other side, answer violence with violence. Neither will work, and so the fires of hatred and resentment merely intensify.
Norwich Norwich Free Academy students on Thursday learned how the state’s juvenile and adult criminal justice systems work and how prosecutors and judges alike are not out to just “lock people up.”
The Norwich NAACP Robertsine Duncan Youth Council questioned a panel of criminal justice experts during a forum titled “Strengthening our Community and Criminal Justice System.” The program was the second forum by the youth council as part of the Norwich NAACP’s Black History Month program.
“It costs about $50,000 a year to incarcerate a person,” state prosecutor Lonnie Braxton said. “If we had a way of figuring out first who had mental health issues, we would probably lose between 40 and 60% of our business. If we could find out who truly had a mental health, compounded by a self-treatment drug addiction problem, we would probably lose another 10-15%.”