Prosecutors in the US wield unrivaled influence over the incarceration of alleged criminals. “We’re always poking at the prisons and sentencing laws and police practices – and all of those things are important and need to be addressed, but the one lever that hasn’t really been addressed and will push everything over the edge is this one,” Foss said.
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Foss wants to use the platform not just to apply political pressure, but to train the nation’s prosecutors, especially young ones, on how to rethink the application of justice.
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When Legend’s Free America hosted a gathering for progressive prosecutors in 2015, Foss was there, and it was there his vision for a new organization, now named Prosecutor Integrity was born. And you realize that it’s just a cycle that keeps repeating.” “You begin to realize how much trauma and pain and abuse have been victims of themselves before they got to prison, and since they’ve been in prison. Legend said he wasn’t surprised by much of what he saw in the prisons, but was definitely disturbed. The biggest challenge Foss is likely to face is fear. Through his organization Free America, Legend has been trying to bring attention to the over two million Americans in prison in order to change what he calls the “misguided” criminal justice policies leading to America having the largest prison population in the world. The singer and songwriter spent much of last year on a tour of prisons around the country, visiting nine of them and sometimes performing for inmates. “The only way we are going to slow that down is if we focus on holistic criminal justice reform and so much of that happens in the prosecutor’s office.” “We are sending in droves our young men into a system that erases them from public view and public consideration,” Legend told the Guardian.
Now the two want to change the way prosecutors nationwide think about their job, and to recruit them into the war against mass incarceration. He spent eight years as an assistant district attorney in Boston, but rather than focusing on high conviction rates or projecting a “tough on crime” attitude, he has been far more interested in alternatives to incarceration, and on keeping juvenile offenders out of prison.įoss’s efforts might have ended there, making tweaks on the fringes of a flawed system, but in 2015, he met singer John Legend, who is no stranger to activism. He wears his hair in long dreadlocks that flow down to his ankles, and beaded bracelets ornate his wrists. A dam Foss doesn’t look like your average prosecutor.
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