Justice in our age

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, interviewed the former FBI director James Comey last week. “I think he has an emptiness inside of him,” Comey said about Trump.

Anand Giridharadas, an American author and newspaper columnist posted on Twitter that “Comey says a stunning thing here. He doesn’t like the term ‘mass incarceration’ because he thinks, in general, each case is fairly decided on its own. That someone of his stature can ignore the systemic issues of race in criminal justice and hawk a book on ethics is absurd.”

In the interview, Comey said: — “There’s a list of tragedies associated with the huge number especially of men of colour, black men in particular, in jail. But there is nothing mass about it, in that sense. Everybody was charged individually, represented individually, appeared in front of a judge, contested guilt or pled guilty.”

On this, Giridharadas commented in his tweet: “If he really thinks America ended up with the largest prison population on earth with a bunch of individual cases decided individually, he doesn’t grasp what a system is, what power is, and so has no business joyriding through the national media touting himself as a moral leader. This strikes me as some of the biggest news of his book tour. James Comey revealing the bankruptcy of his vision on the most important question of justice in our age.”