Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

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.

Every life needs a little space. It leaves room for good things to enter it.

Jesus Christ is my joy.

Get outside. Watch the sunrise. Watch the sunset. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel big or tiny? Because there's something good about feeling both.

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

Well I never had a place that I could call my very own/That's all right, my love, 'cause you're my home.

He that hath children, all his morsels are not his owne.

I have a desperate longing to have a desperate longing

Credulity is the common failing of inexperienced virtue; and he who is spontaneously suspicious may justly be charged with radical corruption.

The disasteris not the money, although the money will be missed. The disaster is the disrespect--this belief that the arts are dispensable, that they're not critical to a culture's existence.

That which an enraged woman can accomplish.