Quotes from Susan Burton

Telling your story is transformative. For both the storyteller and their audience, a new bridge to understanding is created.

When I see a woman make it over all the obstacles, my heart just sings.

Long before I ever got incarcerated, I should've been able to access services that help me deal with the grief and the loss of my son, that help me deal with the trauma, the abuse that I experienced as a child.

Many times, I left the prison thinking, 'I'm smart. I can make it. I won't get caught up again.' But you get off downtown Skid Row, and you're a target for all of the environmental harms in that area. The pain and trauma in that area is so thick, you can almost reach your hand out and touch it.

Most incarcerated women have stories that are similar to mine. They suffered great trauma as children.

It would have been great if there were a trauma center located in our community, where you could access grief counseling and be able to address it in a healthy manner.

I knew hundreds and hundreds of women like me, who had traveled in and out of prison in a revolving door. They needed support and help just like I had received. And it could make a difference, just like it had made a difference in my life. I wanted to see them come back to the community and have a chance at a different life, too.

The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for white women is 1 in 118; for black women, it's 1 in 19.

Research suggests that people rarely change their minds or form a new worldview based on facts or data alone; it is through stories (and the values systems embedded within them) that we come to reinterpret the world and develop empathy and compassion for others.

Since 1980, the rate of incarceration for women has risen more than 700 percent. The majority of these women are imprisoned for nonviolent offenses.

Three days: that's the average time for someone to relapse after getting out of prison.

In Los Angeles from 1940 to 1945, the white population rose less than 20 percent, while the black population increased nearly 110 percent. Yet only 5 percent of the city's residential areas allowed blacks.

it allowed me to engage with my experience intellectually instead of practically, to analyze it instead of trying to fix it. And it demonstrated how another woman, in another time, had struggled with a version of my problem and tried to make sense of her story in her own language.

I could just stay there, in the place where I was always different. For years...I held myself apart. I will not commit to you. Though I am here, my real life is elsewhere. It was the only stance I knew how to take.

It showed me one thing that being an adult meant. You were no longer limited to observing the world: Now you can join in. Instead of just being a fan of things you loved, you could get inside them. You could make them yourself. I was thrilled to know this. I was twenty-one years old and I was going to move to New York, get a job at a magazine, and become a writer.

But there I was, in street clothes, walking into the California Institution for Women, knowing I'd be able to walk out. As I passed through the doors into the yard, I felt a rush of emotion. I was here with purpose, in possession of my dignity, my individuality, my own power—all the things that had been stripped from me the last time I stood in this yard.

And I desperately wanted to return to the world! I didn't want to waste any more time. I was determined, so determined, not to waste time ever again.

Sixty-five million Americans with a criminal record face a total of 45,000 collateral consequences that restrict everything from employment, professional licensing, child custody rights, housing, student aid, voting, and even the ability to visit an incarcerated loved one. Many of these restrictions are permanent, forever preventing those who've already served their time from reaching their potential in the workforce, as parents, and as productive citizens.

A criminal history was like a credit card with interest—so what if you paid off the balance, the interest still kept accruing. And accruing and accruing and accruing.

When I left the parole building that day, it was the first time in two decades that I was no longer in the clutches of the U.S. justice system.

What does it mean that the number-one funder for political campaigns in our state is the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which is the prison guards' union? It means that law enforcement organizations are deciding who will be our governors and our state senators, who in turn write laws to expand prisons.

The number of children under age eighteen with a mother in prison has more than doubled since 1991. Approximately 10 million American children have or have had a parent in prison.

Most public housing authorities automatically deny eligibility to anyone with a criminal record. No other country deprives people of the right to housing because of their criminal histories.

To feel wrecked, you didn't need accumulated badness. One mess-up was all it took.