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

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.

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.

My great crime wasn't refusing to represent an innocent man; my great crime was imagining that there was some path to racial justice that did not include those we view as 'guilty'.

Dance above the surface of the world. Let your thoughts lift you into creativity that is not hampered by opinion.

No matter what, I always have expensive designer shoes. It's all about the shoes for me.

We shouldn't have stupid cars that use liquid fossil fuels. Come on, how outmoded is that? We have to get to the point where this is no longer a part of our experience.

America is still a government of the naive, for the naive, and by the naive. He who does not know this, nor relish it, has no inkling of the nature of his country.

Money is bounded; we only have so much of it. Love goes on forever.

To give up is easy. But to hold it together when everyone else thinks you'd fall apart is true strength.

The aim of development must be neither producerism not consumerism, but the satisfaction of fundamental human needs, which are not only needs of humanity...

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flight The Stars before him from the Field of Night, Drives Night along with them from Heav'n, and strikes The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light

My greatest hero is Nelson Mandela. What a man. Incarcerated for 25 years, he was released in 1990 and he hasn't reoffended. I think he's going straight, which shows you prison does work.