Somebody’s gotta pay

The following is an excerpt from part two:

There have been many instances of Catholic priests being found guilty of child molestation. Certainly, some of the assertions are factual. Certainly, there is nothing to stop any distorted, money-hungry “victim” from claiming that “the priest did those things to me when I was a child.” It’s a done deal—all that is left is to cash the check. Yet with new DNA technology, more and more convicted rapists are being exonerated. One man from Texas has recently been cleared of any wrongdoing after having been imprisoned for twenty-seven years. For him, as with many in our injustice system, arbitrary testimony used as evidence is relied upon as proof.

Freedom Writers is a heartrending and heartwarming 2007 movie starring Hilary Swank as an excited new teacher in the 1990s at a Long Beach, California high school. A new integration program jeopardizes the once solidly structured curriculum. The film is based on the book The Freedom Writers Diary by Erin Gruwell, which evolved from a project she assigned to her students who, after a considerable struggle, came to respect her.

Andre, a black student, learns that his older brother is sentenced to a fifteen-year prison term for a crime he did not commit. He succinctly summarizes the unstated philosophy of the criminal injustice system in two sentences: “Justice don’t mean that the bad guy goes to jail. It just means that somebody’s gotta pay for the crime.”