The fact that crime and poverty are correlated is automatically taken to mean that poverty causes crime, not that similar attitudes or behavior patterns may contribute to both poverty and crime.
With sad, depressing predictability, the children of today's underclass become tomorrow's criminals and dropouts.
The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.
What was most important, for me, is that I could share what I experience as a young person - in particular, what impact incarceration and policing had on my life and my family's life.
Most of today's black convicts have come to understand that they are the most abused victims of an unrighteous order.
Black folks don't have a chance, so they are in the hood, dealing drugs, in a shoot-out. They do it again and one more time they are out.
There's a black man inside of me just trying to make bail.
First of all I would make about 80% of the people law-abiding citizens again. The policy which is carried out now makes every entrepreneur and businessman a thief against his own will.
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.
Perhaps there should be a box on the census form that says, 'I'm a criminal.' Everyone who has ever committed a crime would be required to check it. If everyone were forced to acknowledge their own criminality, maybe we, as a nation, would second-guess our apparent zeal for denying full citizenship to those branded felons.
In the United States the state monopoly on the use of violence has intensified since the 1980s, and in the process, has been increasingly directed against young people, low-income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, and women.
Very few men imprisoned for economic crimes or even crimes of passion against the oppressor feel that they are really guilty.
'Bonnie and Clyde,' while one of the best movies ever made, was far more interested in portraying Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker as romantic anti-establishment Robin Hoods than what they really were: white-trash spree killers.
We don't have time to waste. Our communities are crumbling; our children are under siege. Failing schools and a for-profit prison-industrial complex are sucking the life out of black homes and communities. We are not going down like this!
If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair.
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.
One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.
The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.
Crime is a tax on the poor
After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag—the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.
The jails are full of kids from kids' homes. You're 16 years old, and you're out on the street. How you going to fend for yourself at 16 if you've not had an education? You're going to turn to crime.
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.
Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.
If you want to stop crime in America you must stop it at the top ... You cannot stop it at the bottom because the bottom is a reflection of the top.
Louis Eugene Walcott
What every American should know is that we have more people in jail today than any other country on Earth, more than China. We have some 2.2 million people in jail. What that means is that a lot of lives are being destroyed.
