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In fact, they're a national cancer, mostly affecting innocent Blacks and Latinos, wrongfully sentenced to death and murdered by authorities who know it and don't care. Others are imprisoned for life when officials won't admit errors and release them because America's corrupted prison industrial complex thrives on adding inmates, justice be damned to do it.
Author Michelle Alexander calls it "The New Jim Crow" in her book by that title, calling mass incarceration a modern-day caste system created by elitist racists who embrace colorblindness. As a result, imprisonment became a politically charged social control instrument, unrelated to crime.
Exposing it by combining investigative journalism and advocacy for justice earned Protess the distinction he deserves. Denigrating him is contemptible and shameless. It also taints Northwestern, Medill and Dean Lavine for compromising inviolable academic and speech freedoms.
The Innocence Project (IP)
Full information on it can be found through the following link, now continued by Protess' Chicago Innocence Project (CIP):
http://www.medillinnocenceproject.org/
Founded in 1999, IP's mission statement says it "engages undergraduate journalism students....in investigative reporting of miscarriages of justice, with priority given to murder cases that resulted in sentences of death or life without parole. Our goal is to expose wrongdoing in the criminal justice system."
Until his wrongful banishment, Protess helped free innocent prisoners, saved from lethal injections or other ways to murder them. He'll now continue that heroic mission as President of his newly opened Chicago Innocence Project, an initiative vitally important to continue, especially by someone of his distinction and commitment.
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