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.

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

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.

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'.

In a society that worships love, freedom and beauty, dance is sacred, It is a paryer for the future, a remembrance of the past and a joyful exclamation of thanks for the present.

as the shadows assumeshapesI fight the slowretreatnowmy once-promisedwindlingdwindlingnowlighting new cigarettespouring moredrinksit has been a beautifulfightstillis.

The cat which isn't let out of the bag often becomes a skeleton in the cupboard.

I believe God has blessed our country. This country has been extraordinarily blessed.

I breastfed Sophie for 14 months and Nicolas for 11 months.

We could ask artists from abroad to come in too, so that there could be a mixing and matching of skills from Europe, America and here which would widen our world.

There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That's what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed.

The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free.