David Lammy Quotes

Ultimately, we must either abandon our reliance on stop and search or abandon any hope for a criminal justice system grounded in equality, impartiality and fairness.

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.

When you live in a world in which juveniles are much more likely to be stopped—or if stopped, be arrested, or if arrested, be adjudicated—if they are Black, then all of the indicators associated with prior criminal history are going to be serving effectively as a proxy for race.

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

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

If stop-and-frisk was a fair and balanced practice that targeted everybody equally across the board, then I could understand the extra precautions being taken, but since it's a practice that targets blacks and Hispanics and gives the police the right to lawfully profile us, I'm not with it.

It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.

Many people don't realize that financial incentives have been built into the drug war that guarantee that law enforcement will continue to arrest extraordinary numbers of people, particularly in poor communities of color, for minor drug offenses that get ignored on the other side of town.

That sounds like Anthony Soprano. He has a point. I've said it before: if you're black and you sell dope, you end up in the big house; if you're white and you sell a large amount of dope, you end up visiting the White House. So it's a matter of race and it's a matter of scale, frankly.

And, for example, like, when you're having the conversation with your child about getting their driver's license. Well, a white family - their biggest fear is just that you're driving safely and that they're minding the rules of the road, whereas a black family - their biggest fear is that their child is going to get pulled over and treated unfairly for a reason that they won't understand.

Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control, a system in which over 50% of young African American kids are unemployed. It is estimated that a black baby born today has a one in four chance of ending up in the criminal justice system.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

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.

Blacks - and critically. black elites - remain skeptical of the procedural fairness of the criminal justice system, while white elites, Democrats and Republicans alike, are more willing to embrace a “law and order” approach to criminal law enforcement.

I think the most serious injustice perpetrated by the court system in America is the inability of a black man to get a jury of his peers.

Young Black men are shot dead by police at 21 times the rate of young white men.

The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.

In a law enforcement situation, black people are not always treated the same as white people would be.

To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing and degrading and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up.

I remember my dad always complaining about getting pulled over. I remember the differences in school systems. I remember seeing police officers, not knowing their names, and knowing that they were there not to protect us, not to serve us, but to watch us.

The other bands are just as bad, but we go to jail more.

There can be racism in a system even if a particular episode of injustice is not a manifestation of that racism. Every single thing in the criminal justice system is not a manifestation of racism, but many things are.

Too often, the very institutions that are supposed to protect and serve our community have instead failed people of color, specifically our black community.

We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.

My research has taught me many important lessons, but perhaps none more important than this: drug effects, like semesters, are predictable; police interactions with black people are not.