Get Off My Neck
Black Lives, White Justice, and a Former Prosecutor’s Quest for Reform
According to a 2018 projection by the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform advocacy organization, one out of every three Black boys born in 2001 will be imprisoned at some point during his lifetime, compared to one out of every 17 White boys. Debbie Hines lays out this startling and dispiriting fact at the outset of Get Off My Neck.
The reality of that vast disparity in criminal justice outcomes stands in stark contrast to the vision of an American dream that provides equal opportunity to all. Resolving this disparity, according to Hines, requires focused reform at the state and local levels because state and local prosecutors’ offices are responsible for tens of millions of criminal cases annually, compared to about 80,000 at the federal level.
It’s a persuasive thesis, and Hines’s book is at its strongest when it’s tying together the compounding effect that systemic racism has at each stage of the criminal justice process—from policing to prosecution to bail to plea or trial practices to sentencing and probation—and how each of these result in disparate real-world consequences to Black people and their families. In the first half of the book, Hines lays out each step of the process, including a chapter on how the criminal justice system disproportionately affects Black youth. Hines gives the statistics and policy analysis life by using examples from her career as a prosecutor in Baltimore and, later, as a criminal defense attorney. Her on-the-ground experiences provide some personal and poignant examples of the system at work, including the daily challenges faced by individuals, however well-meaning, who work within that system.
