"The church's most vexing problem today is how to define itself by the gospel of Jesus' cross. Where is the gospel of Jesus' cross revealed today? The lynching of black America is taking place in the criminal justice system where nearly one-third of black men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight are in prisons, jails, on parole, or waiting for their day in court. Nearly one-half of the more than two million people in prisons are black. That is one million black people behind bars, more than in colleges. Through private prisons and the 'war against drugs,' whites have turned the brutality of their racist legal system into a profit-making venture for dying white towns and cities throughout America. Michelle Alexander correctly calls America's criminal justice system 'the new Jim Crow.' 'The criminalization and demonization of black men,' writes Alexander, 'is one habit that America seems unlikely to break without addressing head-on the racial dynamics that have given rise to our latest caste system.' Nothing is more racist in America's criminal justice system than its administration of the death penalty. America is the only industrialized country in the West where the death penalty is still legal. Most countries regard it as both immoral and barbaric. But not in America. The death penalty is primarily reserved, though not exclusively, for people of color, and white supremacy shows no signs of changing it. That is why the term 'legal lynching' is still relevant today. One can lynch a person without a rope or tree."