Generally, I try to avoid politics on my blog. We as a society need places that are free from the weight of the news cycle and pain of the newspaper. We need to lose ourselves in books and entertainment from time to time. I don’t always succeed entirely, but when I do I try to keep it to the themes of the book and not my opinion.

That said, there are things that shouldn’t be political and as an American I am embarrassed that we have allowed the politicians to create divisions in those things that are supposed to be sacred to this country. The core ideas that make the United States of America something worth believing in. The core of those is the fundamental dignity of all human life. It has been written and said in many ways by many people. We have had proclamations, dreams, addresses and more to get across the same point. That all people are people deserve to be treated with basic respect and given basic freedoms. Yet far too many of us still don’t believe. We look at someone who has done things that are wrong and think they deserve punishment without understanding that how we choose to treat people is about who we are rather than who they are.

“A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Home, Justice and Freedom,” explores what I believe to be the clearest example of the misunderstanding of the core of what The United States of America should be. It tells the story of people who have been sent to prison for the rest of their life due largely to mandatory minimums and a war on drugs that is and always been a war on addicts and the poor more than on drugs. It touches on the failures of all three branches of our government to understand what we are supposed to be and shows the victims of all of our failures remaining strong and hold on to their humanity and dignity even when people try to take it away.

The people in “A Knock at Midnight” are extraordinary people. They show wisdom, kindness, and grace that are far beyond what they should. That could make it easy to believe that they are the tiny minority of prisoners who have actually been wronged by the system. People who committed low-level drug offenses, but because they were unwilling to pass along their pain to others, they didn’t get plea deals. If that were true than the clemency and pardon system might be enough. But I believe in the fundamental value of all human lives. What that means is that all people are extraordinary if you look carefully. Perhaps they are smart or wise, or perhaps they are simply extraordinary in their endurance, as everyone who survives in the American prison system must be.

Yet seeing these individuals and the people who love them is important because in America we have begun to embody another truth more than the one that we should. That dark truth is that “One death is a tragedy; One million is a statistic.” We argue about the amount of punishment and why prisons exist in the abstract, making it a cold calculus. I have often pointed out the many important math statistics. That America has a higher percentage of its population in prison than anyplace in the world. That we spend massive amounts of money to hold people in cages, which gains us little or nothing. Those might convince people to change the system in small incremental ways. To lower our prison population by a few percent here and there, to pardon a thousand people when hundreds of thousands are held unjustly. But “A Knock at Midnight” makes a more powerful and more basic argument. The argument is that these are people and each of them has people who love and care about them who are just as much in prison as those held in the cages.

In the last year, America has looked more carefully at its police. We have asked if having our police armed like the military is acceptable. We have questioned if sending armed men to check if a mentally unstable person took their medication is the best option. We have discussed whether allowing people to break into someone’s house, who is by definition of the law innocent, in hopes to find evidence for a trial to determine their guilt is acceptable. We have watched men have their lives taken and many of us have felt as if there is nothing that can be done. You can’t give George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or any of the other victims of police violence back their lives.

“A Knock at Midnight” made it clear to me that while we can, and should, do everything possible to stop violent crime, the bigger crime is a section of our society that still has a knee on their collective necks. They won’t suffocate in eight minutes, but have suffered decades of the slow, painful strangulation of prison and the many stigmas of being a criminal even when they avoid or leave prison.

It is painful to understand because it is easier to look at something you can’t do anything about. It is an abstract problem of statistics, and the most we can do is punish someone. But when you understand that there are people right now suffering that shouldn’t be. That there are people held in cages even though the laws that were used to convict them have since been determined to be unfair to you have a more immediate problem because there are things that can be done for them. And it isn’t just the fight to get them free that Brittany K. Barnett has been working at for years. We can insist that we treat the people in our custody better and send fewer people to jail. We can fight to make sure that those who must spend some time in jail are trained and prepared to thrive once they leave and we can stop punishing people long after they have been allowed to leave prison by changing our hiring practices and allowing them to have their voice back in terms of their votes.

The understanding that our criminal justice system is broken isn’t new to anyone who has been paying attention. But it is important that we move beyond the statistics and return to the tragedy of a single life taken away for no reason. It is time we look to other countries, like Germany, who have learned from their past and choose to become more enlightened by it by believing that people can rise above their past as well.