Now that's hard for many people to believe, given that the media image of a drug dealer is a black kid standing on the street corner with his pants sagging down.

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.

...this is life. Right here in this room, with you, is life.

A member of the committee slapped a name tag over my left bosom. "What shall we name the other one?" I smiled. She was not amused.

Designed by architects with honorable intentions but hands of palsy.

There are some very significant changes in the way the fluids are distributed in our body, the way our heart functions initially, and as well as our bone and muscle.

To those who think that the law of gravity interferes with their freedom, there is nothing to say.

There are things we know and things we don't know about food. But there are certain basic things we do know, and that's what I've tried to build these rules on.

The Midwest is such a tabula rasa.

I mainly read non-fiction, and that's probably because I have a huge amount of insecurity about my lack of education and the things I don't know.

One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free, healthy press.

Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache: do be my enemy for friendship's sake.