Jeff Gerritt: NAACP aims for justice in the face of mass incarceration of Black Men

• Eric Holder's Speech at the Detroit NAACP Dinner [HERE] 

From [HERE] The Detroit Branch NAACP will mark 100 years at Sunday's Annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner, including an address by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. But some of the most important conversations will happen the day before, as the world's oldest and largest civil rights organization puts the criminal justice system front and center.

It's right on time -- maybe even overdue. In recent decades, mass incarceration and the criminal justice system that feeds it have become the nation's most pressing civil and human rights problem, especially for young people living in the concentrated poverty of the nation's central cities. For many of them, the lack of educational and employment opportunities has created a dangerous sense of hopelessness.

Driven by public policy changes, U.S. prison populations have increased eightfold over the past four decades -- with little or no effect on crime rates. Mass incarceration has severed social networks, left one in 14 black children with a parent in prison, and created lifelong employment barriers for the 95% of prisoners who eventually return to their communities. Hundreds of thousands of young urban men grow up on blocks where going to prison has become a norm, maybe even an expectation.

Those failures are costing billions of dollars that the nation could use for education, health care and other needs. They're also costing something far more valuable: the priceless potential of so many people, especially young African-American men, to contribute to their communities and country.

To be sure, the NAACP has always been on the right side of this issue. But the centerpiece meetings on Saturday show criminal justice and mass incarceration have moved from issue to priority.

"It's time," Darryl Jamual Woods, 40, told me Wednesday. He's an inmate at Ryan Correctional Facility who heads the NAACP prison program. "Let's have the courage to act, so we can stop spending $35,000 a year to lock someone up and spend those dollars on education, training and employment."

On Saturday, from 10 a.m. to noon, "Stops and Cops: A Youth Survival Guide for Police Encounters" will bring together police officers, judges, defense attorneys and young people, ages 16 to 21. Cops and youths will act out real-life encounters, including traffic stops, street confrontations and the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

More than 200 young people will evaluate and discuss what they see. Everyone will get a wallet-sized card with 10 tips for handling police encounters.

"You can be respectful but also understand that you have some rights," Melvin Butch Hollowell, general counsel of the Detroit Branch NAACP, told me Wednesday. "We don't want our young people to make mistakes that stop their careers before they start."

Then, from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., a panel discussion, "America's Addiction to Incarceration," including U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, Detroit Police Chief Ralph Godbee Jr. and Keith Bennett of Goodwill Industries of Greater Detroit, will examine U.S. incarceration rates and their impact on education funding and the economy.

With the world's highest incarceration rate, the U.S. locks up more than 2 million people, half of them African Americans. Michigan, with 44,000 prisoners and one of the nation's highest incarceration rates, spends $2 billion a year on corrections, making it one of only four states that spend more on prisons than higher education.

These trends have reshaped the struggle for a just and equitable society. Despite the gains African Americans have made on many fronts, including the Oval Office, the number of black men in prison has increased fivefold in the last 20 years, with rippling effects. More than 1 million back men cannot vote after leaving prison because of state laws that disenfranchise them.

A critical debate about mass incarceration is not about avoiding personal responsibility or accountability. Inmates like Woods, for example, advocate restorative justice programs that enable prisoners and ex-prisoners to give back to their communities. But any real discussion must also recognize the impact of uneven drug laws and sentencing policies, racial profiling and other biases and conditions that have made the criminal justice system often unjust.

Nowhere is the nation's failure to solve its problems of race and class more glaring than inside the steel walls of its prisons. Now the nation's largest civil rights organization has the problem straight in its sights.