Mark Green Quotes

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

For the urban poor the police are those that arrest you. In almost any slum there is a vast conspiracy against the forces of law and order.

Criminality is always the result of poverty. Countries that experience such a fundamental change as we have - we had the apartheid regime and must now develop a multicultural democracy - must necessarily pass through a phase of high crime rates.

There are people in whole parts of our cities who are being totally left behind and disregarded. They are unheard. They are told they are unneeded by this economy. And that extreme poverty breeds conditions for extreme violence.

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.

This awful concept of underclass is really horrifying. You're not lower class, you are excluded - outside.

That the poor are invisible is one of the most important things about them. They are not simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are not seen.

Just because you are poor and have no voice does not mean that you don’t deserve police protection.

If crime went down 100 percent it would still be 50 percent higher than it should be.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.

One of the things I learned is that you've got to deal with the underlying social problems if you want to have an impact on crime - that it's not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of violent crime where you see the greatest amount of social dysfunction.

It was a slow understanding that my kidnappers really are a product of their environment.

I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

I feel it's part of my job to make the problems of the poor compelling.

I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South.

The number one cause of crime is criminals.

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.

He must be a bold man indeed who is confident that he knows what causes crime.

We will not settle for a state that will settle for an underclass.

… the submerged tenth

The great mass of the poor in countries are become an hereditary race, and it is next to impossible them to get out of that state of themselves

Treating women like a burden to the men is one of the reasons for poverty.