*Attorney and Emmy Nominated producer for the mass incarceration documentary “Freeway Crack In the System,” Antonio Moore, rebuts the statement by Denzel Washington about “not blaming the system.”

Moore uses data, and his professional expertise to answer Denzel, and call for more dialogue on the system issues in the criminal justice system.

Denzel Washington Statement to NY Daily News:

‘It starts with how you raise your children. If a young man doesn’t have a father figure, he’ll go find a father figure. ‘So you know I can’t blame the system. It’s unfortunate that we make such easy work for them.’

Moore’s Article “Black Male Incarceration is Real and Catastrophic” details the systemic nature of out criminal justice system. Read an excerpt below:

Yet the real issue is the number of people in prison should never be similar to the number educated. For most in our country this in fact holds true, but for black men the two numbers are in fact close and that is the inescapable problem. The supposed myth on its face may in fact be incorrect. There may be more black men in college than in prison, but the truth still stands that there are a socially catastrophic number of black men behind bars in the United States. Let me give a bit of context for this discussion. Referencing the same article above “The Census estimates that approximately 18,508,926 people in the U.S. population are black males, of all ages…The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Prisoner Statistics Program reports that in that same year, 526,000 were in state or federal prisons, and, as of mid-year 2013, 219,660 were in local jails, making for a total of about 745,000 behind bars” To give a lens for viewing this data India is a country of 1.2 Billion people, the country in total only has around 380,000 prisoners. In fact, there are more African American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations in India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel and England combined.

Antonio Moore, an attorney based in Los Angeles, is one of the producers of the Emmy-nominated documentary Freeway: Crack in the System. He has contributed pieces to the Grio, Huffington Post, and Inequality.org on the topics of race, mass incarceration and economics. Follow him on YouTube Channel Tonetalks.