Nicholas Kristof Quotes

The primary contact between Black men and the government today is the prison system.

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

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.

We have too many Black men in jail waiting for justice and too many Black women in church waiting for Jesus.

We have one Black man as President; we have one million Black men in prison.

We have a mass incarceration among minorities that is disproportionate to our population. It's a travesty what's going on with our mass incarceration specifically of minorities.

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

You know and we have about 60 to 70 percent black men in prison today and it's because of the negativity they have in their own hearts.

We think it's OK for us to have the world's largest prison population and for one racial group to be overrepresented therein.

Negro life in Washington is a promise rather than a fulfillment.

There are poor people of color in this country whose bodies, locked in cages, enrich the prison-industrial complex.

I have spent years representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color - and attempting to help people who have been released from prison attempting to 're-enter' into a society that never seemed to have much use to them in the first place.

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

The mass incarceration going on in this country and with my people is crazy.

The U.S. prison system, over all, disproportionately affects black and brown people, but people of color are overrepresented to a greater degree in private prisons.

We send young white boys to the Army. We're sending young black boys to the prisons.

So many people representing different sections of our community are taken down one way or another. The system was designed to break us down. You think it isn’t true? The three-strike rule is to break down a black man.

I want to see somebody go to jail over the financial crisis and not just black, brown and poor whites over humbles and minor drug beefs.

Poor people, people of color - especially are much more likely to be found in prison than in institutions of higher education.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

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

I am appalled and ashamed that things should have come to such a pass in this country that I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.