Susan Burton Quotes

Bill Clinton championed discriminatory laws against formerly incarcerated people that have kept millions of Americans locked in a cycle of poverty and desperation.

For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated.

There are no quick fixes to Indigenous poverty and social disaster.

We might think of prisons as miniature socialist societies, where government is in full control. For that reason, they are a complete failure for everyone but those who get the contracts to build the jails and those who work in them.… In prison, nothing takes place outside the government's purview. The people therein are wholly and completely controlled by state managers, which means that they have no value. And yet it is a place of monstrous chaos, abuse, and corruption. Is it any wonder that people coming out of prison are no better off than before they went in, and are often worse, and scarred for life?

Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.

And if you want to make many of our black leaders angry, just tell them that racism is not the number problem that black Americans face.

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.

The greatest myth about mass incarceration is that it has been driven by crime and crime rates. It's just not true.

All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you've been labeled a felon.

The Left has done a remarkable job marketing themselves as being the party for minorities when every single policy they put forth, from education to employment, has done more to harm these communities than to help.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

We're poor black kids from Akron, Ohio. When you tell stories about people like us, sometimes it's going to be considered a social-impact story.

Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal.

I agree with President Obama and Attorney General Holder that we need to reform our criminal sentencing laws.

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.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

It's hard being black. You ever been black? I was black once - when I was poor.

The people made worse off by slavery were those who were enslaved. Their descendants would have been worse off today if born in Africa instead of America. Put differently, the terrible fate of their ancestors benefitted them.

For the better part of two centuries, outsiders have been offering explanations that range from racist to learned-sounding - the supposed inferiority of blacks, the heritage of slavery, overpopulation - for why Haiti remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Faced with the way the system does you in the 'hood sometimes, if you don't literally get out, your chances are slim. You'll definitely die mentally. You'll pretty much die physically.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released.

The United States imprisons many non-violent offenders who could instead be required to pay fines, perform community service, and make restitution to their victims… Maintaining our vast network of prisons consumes resources that could be better spent on education and other crime prevention efforts... Rather than reforming offenders, prison too often degrades and dehumanizes prisoners, making the task of rehabilitation and reentry into society even more difficult.

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