Young, Gifted and Black Coalition

press release: Free the 350 Action Highlights Two Madisons in Criminal Justice Process

July 21st at 3:30 pm, City County Building at 210 MLK Blvd

Who: Young Gifted and Black and Groundwork with community members

What: An action and march to highlight the vast racial disparities in the Dane County Criminal system.  

White people and people with privilege will highlight the crimes that they have committed but weren't arrested or incarcerated for. People of color and particularly Black people will highlight how they or family and friends have been directly impacted by the prison industrial complex.

The death of Sandra Bland has awakened the nations consciousness once again to the corruption of the criminal system. Sandra was a Black Lives Matter activist who was pulled over supposedly for changing lanes without signaling.  Video shows her being brutalized by police after the stop. 3 days later she was found dead in her cell.

From police contact, to arrests, to referrals, to sentencing, to incarceration, state violence oppresses people of color and particularly Black people while simultaneously privileging white people.

We need to Free 350 Black people and close the 11 to 1 arrest rate gap to balance out the racial disparities. The other way to balance this out would be to incarcerate 6,000 white people. This shows how drastic the imbalance is and what a big impact incarcerating 350 people has on the Black community. We believe that incarceration is not the answer to our problems, and instead it creates more problems for low income communities and communities of color.

 For more info, checkout out the Facebook event:  https://www.facebook.com/events/739064376215708/