Jean and I continued our travels from Maine to New Hampshire, and onto our friends Donna and Marian outside of Troy, New York! Almost as soon as we landed we were talking about the great gift of meeting Robert Shetterly. Right away our friends recalled that Dr. Alice P. Green hails from this area and is one of the paintings that Rob has lifted up - An American Who Tells the Truth. We recounted seeing the paintings and the feeling of good will that emanated from the canvas. We are grateful for the good friends and good conversations we have about all the good that is possible.
Dr. Alice P. Green - Social Justice Activist, Police and Prison Reformer, Writer: 1940-2024
Dr. Alice P. Green experienced a traumatic instance of racism as a Black teenager growing up in the lily-white iron-ore-mining hamlet of Witherbee in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. She devoted the rest of her life to fighting injustice wherever she found it.
In 1985, she founded and served as executive director of the Center for Law and Justice in New York’s capital city of Albany. She established the Center in response to the killing of Jesse Davis, an unarmed and mentally ill Black man who was shot to death in his apartment in 1984 by three white Albany police officers, who were later exonerated.
Dr. Green and her Center provided support and assistance to formerly incarcerated individuals who struggled to find work and a place to live as they tried to re-integrate into their hometown communities. She wrote academic papers and lobbied state legislators for prison reform, on behalf of prisoners of color who were disproportionately incarcerated in state correctional facilities.
In the dedication to her 2021 memoir, We Who Believe in Freedom: Activism and the Struggle for Racial Justice, Dr. Green wrote: “My heart aches for all those who have and continue to be harmed by a legal system blinded by injustice and racism and dedicated to punishment and suffering instead of love and caring.”
Dr. Green’s fierce and tireless advocacy work extended to efforts to reform the Albany Police Department and its policing policies, which undermined trust and created animosity in Black communities. Her research argued that police have caused disenfranchisement through racial profiling; by arresting Blacks significantly more often than whites; and by engaging in police brutality against Blacks with distressing frequency, including fatally shooting unarmed Black men. Her reform efforts led to the creation in 2016 of Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), a program in Albany that diverts low-level criminals away from jail and into treatment services for addiction and mental illness. Through Dr. Green’s leadership, Albany became the third city in the nation, following Seattle and Santa Fe, to establish a LEAD program— which have had proven success in reducing high rates of recidivism.
In addition to publishing numerous journal articles and lecturing widely on these issues, she co-authored the scholarly book Law Never Here: A Social History of African American Responses to Issues of Crime and Justice (1999) with Dr. Frankie Bailey, a professor in the University at Albany’s Criminal Justice Department.
From Americans Who Tell the Truth - read more about Alice at this link.
Invitation: “My heart aches …”
Read more about Dr. Alice P. Green at this Wikipedia link, The Center for Law and Justice and the books she wrote.
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“My heart aches for all those who have and continue to be harmed by a legal system blinded by injustice and racism and dedicated to punishment and suffering instead of love and caring.” Dr. Alice P. Green.
The mass incarceration system in this county is an immoral blight upon the soul of this country. The for-profit prison system depends upon incarcerating and keeping people in jail, with high percentages of people of color falling victim to it. The current actions of detaining immigrants by ICE without due process are violations of human rights and the rule of law -- a system blinded by injustice and racism as Dr. Green has identified.