Incarceration Quotes - page 2
At what price have so many of us come to believe that the economy is the realm of natural order and that the legitimate and competent sphere of policing-of administration and government-lies elsewhere? What flows from that sharp dichotomy between orderliness in the market and ordering in the penal sphere? At what price do we embrace these categories? And here, the answer is equally clear: at the price, first, of naturalizing the market and thereby effectively shielding from normative assessment the regulatory mechanisms in our contemporary markets and the wealth distributions that occur daily; and at the price, second, of easing, facilitating, and enabling the massive expansion of our penal sphere, or, to be more provocative, of making possible mass incarceration today.
Bernard Harcourt
The sexual revolution has begun to devour its children. The statistics on abortion, divorce, collapsing birthrates, single-parent homes, teen suicides, school shootings, drug use, child abuse, spouse abuse, violent crime, incarceration rates, promiscuity, and falling test scores show how this society, in which the cultural revolution is ascendant, is decomposing and dying. Empty nurseries and full waiting rooms outside the psychiatrist's office testify that all is not well. But before this diseased culture runs its course, it may take the West down with it.
Pat Buchanan
To reiterate, rather than try to imagine one single alternative to the existing system of incarceration, we might envision an array of alternatives that will require radical transformations of many aspects of our society. Alternatives that fail to address racism, male dominance, homophobia, class bias, and other structures of domination will not, in the final analysis, lead to decarceration and will not advance the goal of abolition.
Angela Davis
The Shabaka [Sundiata Waglini] story illuminates the most sordid defects of capital punishment. His blackness and poverty helped doom him. He was ruthlessly cheated; it was never his privilege to be granted - even for a phantom crime - the incarceration [i.e. instead of death row] that it meted out to others and that carries the possibility of redemption.
William Styron
Dark Fields of the Republic and Midnight Salvage were written during the final decade of the twentieth century and against the grain of their society. The economic and technological expansion, with the terrible human and environmental prices paid, were (and are) accelerating, while at the same time language itself, the medium of my art, was deteriorating. We had become the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Adrienne Rich
we are all concerned about mass incarceration in the country today. If you want to know how we got there, right now what we're doing, with people like Jeff Sessions and that guy in the White House, is how we got there. And they're trying to ensure that we go back there, in part because it's going to affect primarily, negatively affect, black people and brown people in this country.
Jeff Sessions
