Jill Stein on Crime Green Party presidential nominee; Former Challenger for MA Governor

Black Lives Matter movement is a vital & logical response

She called for a raft of measures to combat police violence, including civilian review boards and independent investigators. She also called for a "truth and reconciliation commission" of the kind created in post-Apartheid South Africa, where the country attempted to grapple with its racist history. She said she wanted the US to reckon with its historic and systemic racism with the goal of eliminating disparities in income and health by race.

Cops violate rights of blacks in cities & Latinos at border

STEIN: Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: We are facing the triple monsters of racism, militarism and extreme materialism--a.k.a. capitalism. We need to build coalitions to link racial justice to climate justice to immigrant justice and to peace and democracy. We are calling for police review boards so that communities are controlling their police and not the other way around. We demand full-time investigators readily available for communities to examine all cases of death & serious injury in police custody. It shouldn't require an act of God to get the Department of Justice to investigate a murder at the hands of the police. We've been there in the border towns where people have not only been fighting for immigrant rights, but just for plain old civil liberties. Along the border, the cops can just violate your civil liberties at will. Civil rights don't really exist.

Black Lives Matter: end racism & police militarization

The fight is building against predatory mass incarceration, that holds one in three African American men hostage to our vast prison state.

Judicial system makes mistakes & kills innocent people

A: No. America's experience shows that capital punishment does not effectively stop crimes from being committed. And our judicial system makes mistakes, killing people who are innocent. It's time to move beyond capital punishment, to abolish it, and to instead use life imprisonment as the most severe form of sentencing for those who cannot be trusted to live in common society.

Stop dumping resources into the prison-industrial complex

• Repair our communities rather than dump resources into the prison-industrial complex.
• Work to eliminate laws tying judge's hands with mandatory sentencing requirements.
• Immediately legalize medical use of marijuana and move to permit general legal sales under suitable regulatory framework.
• End the ineffective and costly War on Drugs and begin to treat drug use as a public health problem, not a criminal problem.

Incarcerating poor & minorities has become big business

Death penalty is ineffective, and also barbaric

A: It's barbaric. It's outlawed internationally in all but a few extremely repressive countries like Iran, China, and not many others. It's shameful that it continues to be performed. It's well established that mistakes are made--yet half of our states practice pre-meditated state-sponsored murder. It's also known that it's not effective. So why is it done? Revenge & retribution? That's not what our justice system is supposed to be about. It's not an effective deterrent.

Mandatory sentencing: ineffective & racially discriminatory

A: This has caused an explosion of our prison population, most of which are there for non-violent drug offenses. Mandatory sentencing has not been effective as a deterrent to crime. We can't afford it. The prison-industrial complex is making out like bandits, while very discriminatory injustice prevails. Vast number of African-American and Latinos are being locked up for minimal crimes. Lives and communities are being destroyed.