2025-10-22
4 分钟Hello, it's Lauren Laverne, and this is Desert Island Disks Postcard,
a selection of some of our most memorable moments from some of the thousands of people we've cast away to our imaginary desert island.
This postcard comes from the American lawyer, Bryan Stevenson.
Kirstie Young spoke to Bryan in 2015 about his work.
He's the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in the US.
We're a radically different place than we were 40 years ago.
In 1972, the prison population was 300,000 in America.
Today, it is 2.3 million.
We have 68 million Americans with criminal arrests,
which means that when they apply for jobs, many of them,
they have to write down, I have a criminal arrest,
which is going to dramatically restrict their ability to be employed.
One in three black male babies born in the United States is projected to go to jail or prison.
That wasn't true in the 20th century.
That wasn't true in the 19th century.
It became true in the 21st century.
We are a society that has, in my judgment,
been ravaged by the power of fear and anger and we've allowed incarceration and excessive punishment to define us in ways that I think has created a real crisis.
And so I do think it's changing now that we recognize that this has gone really out of control.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu said of you, you are, I'm quoting here.