By waging the drug war and "getting tough" almost exclusively in the 'hood, we've managed to create a vast new racial undercaste in an astonishingly short period of time.

The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.

We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs

Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

Once you have been branded a criminal or felon, you are typically trapped for life.

The rules and reasons the political system employs to enforce status relations of any kind, including racial hierarchy, evolve and change as they are challenged.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

Sensible motivation is always effective.

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

My gast was pretty well flabbered.

About what one can not speak, one must remain silent.

People often imagine that being hard to please confers a certain superiority.

As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can't see how it is.

The music is huge. I consider it a privilege to do what I do, turn people on to music and tell them about issues.

Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy mothers many an ugly fact.

The meaning of life is to get meaning for life.