On Tuesday, November 18, our social justice group was able to attend an LREI Speaker Series about public policy, this year’s theme. More specifically, the event was about mass incarceration (incarcerating the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, for the wrong time). This panel featured Francis Greenburger, Ann Jacobs, JoAnne Page, Gabriel Sayegh, all who have prestigious positions in different organizations. Francis Greenburger is actually a LREI parent and he the president/founder of the Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice. We sat and listened to this panel talk about mass incarceration and the effects it has had on our country and we were able to learn a lot of statistical things. One thing we learned is that although America is only 5% of the world’s populations, it makes up 25% of the world’s jail population. This is just one of the things we learned that stood out and after listening to the panel we were able to make better connections between police brutality/racial profiling to mass incarceration. Overall this was definitely a good experience to have and it was great to hear from a LREI parent who happens to work professionally on a very similar issue to ours and we hope to possibly attend another speaker event.
