William J. Bratton Quotes

If you're African American, you are forced into making different choices, in a lot of cases, than you are as a white person.

The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.

I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation that had somehow escaped the Civil War. Blacks swabbed the decks, shined shoes, did the cooking, washed the dishes, and served the food. Virtually no other jobs were open to them.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes…. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

One third of African American males are destined to be in prison sometime in their lifetime.

Racial inequality is a big problem.

There are still traces of discrimination against race and gender, but it's a lot different than when I started out. It just comes quietly, slowly, sometimes so quietly that you don't realize it until you start looking back.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having?

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

Apartheid is alive and well and it lives in our schools, and I'm sad to say it lives in the halls of the State legislature.

Where the death penalty is involved, our criminal justice system essentially reserves the death penalty for murderers (regardless of their race) who kill white victims.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

Isn't it blatantly racist to assume blacks can't pass a simple civics exam in the same rates as others?

Civil rights in this country is unfinished business, and racism is alive and well.

I had an affinity for criminal law because I came from that background. I understood it. A lot of lawyers of color understand the inequities of the system and become defense attorneys.

People are swept into the criminal justice system - particularly in poor communities of color - at very early ages... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes.

In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.

If there is one set of laws, one Constitution for every citizen, its protections hopefully applied equally to all, then why do the results seem to differ so radically? What do you call that? Look around - you're living in it.

Black and brown communities are significantly and disproportionately impacted by deficiencies in our criminal justice system.

Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.

Death Row is a bridge out of that ghetto world, giving voices to those people society thinks shouldn't be heard.

Until we address the pervasive structural and interpersonal threats facing communities of color, we will remain unequipped to make equity a reality.