Every February, America dusts off its favorite Black icons, recites a few safe quotes, shows a few movies with popular Black actors and calls it Black History Month. But Black history isn’t something we visit once a year. It’s something we’re still living — in our laws, in our courtrooms, in our jails, and in the daily decisions that determine who gets freedom and who gets punished.
This year, I’m using this space to focus on the part of Black history we don’t like to name out loud: the criminal legal system and the way it continues to harm Black people in real time.
Across the month, I’ll be pulling back the curtain on four layers of that system:
- Week 1: how the system was built — not broken — and how that design still shapes outcomes today
- Week 2: how mental illness and Blackness collide inside jails, often with deadly consequences
- Week 3: how the modern courtroom mirrors the economic and emotional exploitation of earlier eras
- Week 4: how Black resistance, resilience, and community care are building something better
This isn’t theory for me. This is the work I do every day. These are the cases I carry home. These are the people whose lives are reshaped by decisions made in seconds.
And nowhere is the system’s design more obvious than in cases that look identical on paper but unfold like they belong to two different countries.
Two men. Two terroristic threat cases. Two allegations involving people the State labeled as “family members.”
But the similarities end there.
One client — Hispanic by name but light enough to pass for white — was charged without the family‑violence enhancement, even though the complainants were his wife and nephew. That single charging decision opened the door to PR bonds. He went home. He kept working. And when his wife filed an affidavit of non‑prosecution, the case was dismissed.
The other client — a Black man accused by a woman he says he never dated and never lived with — was charged with the family‑violence enhancement anyway. That label triggered a statutory ban on PR bonds. The judge would have released him if she could. She told me that. But the law tied her hands.
So he sat. And sat. And sat.
Nearly forty days in jail for a charge that never should’ve been labeled “family violence” in the first place.
He had the money to bond out, but not the debit card. I was calling bondsmen. I was trying to get funds onto his books. I was troubleshooting things that have nothing to do with law and everything to do with survival. Because that’s what this system forces you to do when you’re Black and poor and overcharged.
In the end, he took a conviction — not because he was guilty, but because the system made freedom too expensive to wait for.
That’s not a broken system. That’s a blueprint.
That blueprint has a lineage. And it isn’t accidental. Slave patrols were armed groups tasked with controlling enslaved people and suppressing any attempt at freedom. After emancipation, Black Codes criminalized everyday Black life — unemployment, travel, even existing outside white supervision. Convict leasing allowed states to arrest Black people for minor “offenses” and lease them to plantations, mines, and railroads for profit.
These weren’t accidents. They were systems of control — and their logic never disappeared. It simply evolved into the laws, policies, and practices we navigate today.
A blueprint that still determines who gets punished before trial and who gets to fight from home.
A blueprint that still decides whose mistakes are treated as criminal and whose are treated as human.
And this is why I’m starting Black History Month here — with the truth that shapes everything else we’ll talk about this month:
The system is working exactly as intended. And that’s the problem.
Next week, we’ll move into the collision between mental illness and Blackness inside jails — and the human cost of a system that punishes symptoms instead of treating people.
On (In)justice 