We must muster the courage, we must find the will, we must do what is necessary to build a truly transformative movement that will end the history and cycle of caste in America.

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.

Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...

I felt the tears streak down my cheeks but I wasn't crying.

Owning a great golf course gives you great power.

Understanding arises from reducing one type of reality into another.

Real change begins with ridding Washington of corruption, of which there's plenty going around.

There is a grace and an ease to power. You feel good about yourself and your life when you have it. It is well worth having, and it is certainly miserable not to have it.

I believe in traditional marriage.

'Don't you worry, and don't you hurry.' I know that phrase by heart, and if all other music should perish out of the world it would still sing to me.

I don't want people to say, 'Something is true because Tyson says it is true.' That's not critical thinking.

I could never be a professional comedian, 'cause you have to keep telling the same jokes. For me, they're like word solos.