Incarceration rates - especially black incarceration rates - have soared regardless of whether crime has been going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.

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.

The truth will form and fall apart again.

Curiosity is called curiosity because of how curiously it can creep into people’s behavior no matter what dangers are around.

The right word at the right time helps you make sense of the world. It helps, but sometimes not a lot.

Nobody has single-handedly done more for the US image than me...

On cable TV they have a weather channel - 24 hours of weather. We had something like that where I grew up. We called it a window

Every master has but one disciple, and that one becomes unfaithful to him, for he too is destined for master-ship.

Office hours are from 12 to 1 with an hour off for lunch.

I travel backwards and forwards quite a lot. I live very near to the train station. I'm kind of playing at being an expatriate, I suppose.

It is not righteousness to outrage

I am a socialist not because I think it is a perfect system, but half a loaf is better than no bread. The other system has been tried and found wanting