Bryan Stevenson: Why mass incarceration defines us as a society

Last June, in two cases brought by Bryan Stevenson, in a landmark judgment, the US Supreme Court ruled that sentencing children to life without parole including for murder, without ever giving them a chance to prove that he or she had been rehabilitated, constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

As well as profiling Stevenson’s work to challenge the use of life sentences without parole for minors, in this interview, Bryan talks about how he came to set up the Equal Justice Initiative, his work advocating for inmates on death-row and how he sees the dispoportionate use of the death penalty against people of colour as part of the long history of racial inequality in the American South.

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Bryan also gave one of the most popular TED talks ever earlier this year on the subject of injustice in the US justice system: