Reverends Irene Monroe and Emmett G. Price III called into Boston Public Radio on Monday and weighed in on the findings of a Harvard Law School study published last week, which shows stark racial disparities throughout the Massachusetts prison system.
Among other conclusions, the study — which took four years to complete — found that Black residents are imprisoned at a rate nearly eight times that of whites, while Latinx people are are imprisoned nearly five times as frequently as their white peers.
“In this season of America, who do we want to be?” Price said. "Are we going to be the land of equal opportunity, the land of freedom for all, or are we going to continue to be a disparate and differential nation where certain people have privileges that others don’t?”
Monroe agreed with the sentiment of her co-host, and criticized Gov. Charlie Baker for not yet responding publicly to the report's findings.
"I think that Baker’s silence behind it does a couple of things. It maintains not only the status quo, but I think in many ways it’s pandering to a police force,” she said, "and a justice system that sorely needs to be reformed.”
"This is a bigger kind of sea change or paradigm shift that we’re asking for, that for centuries this country has been resistant to do,” she added.
Monroe is a syndicated religion columnist and the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail and a visiting researcher in the Religion and Conflict Transformation Program at Boston University School of Theology. Price is professor of worship, church & culture and founding executive director of the Institute for the Study of the Black Christian Experience at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.
Together they host the All Rev’d Up podcast, produced by GBH.
