For many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they're born into.

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.

For someone like myself in whom the ability to trust others is so cracked and broken that I am wretchedly timid and am forever trying to read the expression on people's faces.

Any change that shortens the path between a writer and reader is a win for the book world.

I have known no man of genius who had not to pay in some affliction or defect either physical or spiritual for what the gods had given him.

All noise is waste. So cultivate quietness in your speech, in your thoughts, in your emotions. Speak habitually low. Wait for attention and then you low words will be charged with dynamite.

We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it, that's all.

I've had meetings where a guy actually told me, "What we're trying to figure out is how we can control you." In the meeting, to me! Why do you want to control me?

The string of accusations being made against [Donald] Trump are raising new legal questions about some of these cases. Could actually be considered criminal sexual assault.

Certainly there are spots which inevitably attach to themselves an atmosphere of holiness and goodness; it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.

I like to tell people that all of our products and business will go through three phases. There's vision, patience, and execution.

What else is soul but a listener?