Our Vision

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The days are gone when good people would tolerate tropes about women not being able to handle stressful jobs, or being responsible for inviting sexual harassment by their behavior; Blacks being lazy; Hispanics being dishonest; Asians being clannish; Jews being avaricious; Native Americans being savage, drunks, or illiterate; overweight folks being pathetic, obnoxious, a whole range of less-thans; disabled people being looked down upon.

Aren’t you a good person? Why do good people let this last prejudice go unchallenged, and even supported in our laws?

It is so last century that there is a class of people, 98% of whom are or will become your neighbors, that are subjected to the most outrageous and dehumanizing lies, discrimination, and stigmatization, totally without basis in fact.

Yes, we are talking about justice involved folks, in and out of jails and prisons.

The one single trope, bromide, generalization, stereotype, concept, call it what you will; call it what it is – the one prejudice – that hurts so many, that hurts all of us, is that a person convicted of a crime has a propensity, a persistent moral defect, a continuing character flaw, that makes it likely that that behavior will re-occur.

That not only is not true, it is less likely than that such a crime will occur from the general public than from a former offender! Yet this is used to deny people housing, jobs, ability to contribute to their families and to their communities.

But the truth is, hiring an ex-offender is good business as most will never re-offend, and the numbers of re-offense are lesser than from non-justice involved employees. But most hiring processes do not have mechanisms to consider any mitigating factors, because mitigation may have an effect as to a sentence, but doesn’t get to grey the scale of the cold black and white of a conviction. Nor as to an individual who may have been overcharged. And there is no mercy in the public record for the few that may have been actually innocent, but, for an example, took a plea bargain out of fear of then being wrongly convicted and even more severely punished. Same with renting apartments to them. Returning citizens and their families make fabulous tenants. 

But newspapers report, as one example of many, every time a former criminal re-offends by breaking the law again, but never report that the incidence of re-offending from this population is less, not more, than from the general population.

The purpose of the American Anti-DeHumanization Initiative is first to give a forum to challenging misstatements in the press and popular media like tv shows and movies about formerly convicted and incarcerated people, especially those who have served their sentences. Second, to actively challenge the misinformation being promulgated, published, or declared. And third, to fight for laws that outlaw discrimination, and reverse those that support it.