Opinion: Abolishing the death penalty must be part of reimagining safety

How do we best allocate resources to truly keep everyone as healthy and safe as possible? When viewed from this perspective, an alliance between activists of color advancing community justice and death penalty abolitionists — whose ranks are often whiter — becomes almost inevitable. Capital punishment is more than a visceral and tragic indication of which lives matter in our society. It vividly and powerfully illustrates how scarce public resources and attention are misdirected to support “the machinery of death” instead of policies that will actually promote well-being.