Quotes About Incarceration

Private prisons are an offspring of the larger incarceration binge we have been tracing. The private prisons mark the spaces in U.S. society where the bodies of the poor most dramatically show the results of the policies comprehensively inaugurated by the Ronald Reagan presidency, which sought to privatize in the early 1980s as many government functions as possible. The

The U.S. still confines a higher proportion of its citizens than any other country, and no other nation, in law professor Michelle Alexander's words, "incarcerates such an astonishing percentage of its racial or ethnic minorities.

Investigative journalist Chris Hedges citing ACLU statistics notes that between 1970 and 2015 U.S. prisons have mushroomed by 700 percent.

Moreover, in private prisons people of color are even more overrepresented than they are in federal and state prison populations. This is because private prisons contract to avoid housing the more costly elderly prisoner. They prefer the younger bodies, and so they hold more of the youth of color, the bulk of these coming in as targets of the recent "war on drugs.

Private prisons have a special interest in tapping the burgeoning immigrant groups to fill beds and cells, especially in the post-9/11 period of the so-called "war on terror." The

The 2014 study of the National Research Council found that incarceration continued to rise even while the rate of violent crime decreased.

A few of the confined, especially with succor from the outside as well as inside, will tap the grandeur of mind and spirit to fight off this spirit death and guard their humanity. Many others, though, will descend into the hellhole of prison-life to become themselves, even if released, a hell-making force. Or perhaps as is even more frequent, they remain so steeped in trauma and the prison's pervasive dread that they are without resources for life when released. They

Although African Americans are usually no more than 13 percent of the U.S. population, 40 percent of state death row populations are African American. In some states, like Pennsylvania, 60 percent of the death row population is African American. On federal death row, over 60 percent are from communities of color.

As French novelist and essayist Jean Genet once wrote about prison, "it is in this place that racism reaches its cruelest pitch . . . in this place that racism becomes a kind of concentrate of racism.

To understand prisons as racially structured, consider, first, how the racialized make-up of the prison population is usually described. Writers often deploy a kind of shorthand here, stating the prisons are made up of over 60 percent or more prisoners of color.[80] At one point that figure was as high as 70 percent for "'minorities,"' or 'people of color'.

Second, carceral terror, by implanting fear in the incarcerated, often returns persons broken by fear into their communities. I stressed in the first edition of this book that systems of punitive terror create through brutal prison culture a certain number of predators that often return to the streets, increasing the vulnerabilities of poor neighborhoods.

Lockdown America, especially the mass incarceration and police violence that target poor communities of color, drive such leaders underground. Often, they have been murdered by the police. The Black Panther Party leaders, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who were murdered by Chicago police, together offer perhaps the most memorable case in point. The Philadelphia police bombing and shooting of MOVE Organization members is another example, as discussed at the outset of Part One of this book.

Secondly, what is overlooked by the rhetoric of "mostly blacks and Hispanics" are those prisoners who are Arab-American, A/AAPI, or American Indian. Even

This social leveraging masks how A/AAPIs themselves increasingly experience mass incarceration,[99] and also how some of its youth have experienced racist violence from white vigilantes and police groups[100]—even if their frequency of exposure to carceral violence is less than for blacks and Hispanics. Really,

Even the rising number of poor whites being swept into prison by corporate dispossession and profiteering today are often "blackened," in the sense of being marked in the eyes of the larger society as "transgressive" and in some of the ways often meted out to persons of color. In

The Research Council concluded, "Most studies estimate the crime-reducing effect of incarceration to be small and some report that the size of the effect diminishes with the scale of incarceration." The

The Research Council concluded, "Most studies estimate the crime-reducing effect of incarceration to be small and some report that the size of the effect diminishes with the scale of incarceration." The study emphasizes as a major point that the crime rate is not what influences the incarceration rate. Instead, "the incarceration rate is the outcome of policies affecting who goes to prison and for how long and of policies affecting parole revocation.

We face today an especially sinister emergence, not just more police violence, mass incarceration, and a death penalty, but the rise of the U.S. "carceral" or "penal state." Here

A key to understanding why Lockdown America rises today is to consider our present system of punishment, particularly U.S. mass incarceration and police repression, as related to the production of economic wealth in the recent history of the United States.

Police violence, mass incarceration and the death penalty—the structural triad of the U.S. penal state I term "Lockdown America"—are not just challenges for Christians today, they demand re-thinking and re-creating what Christianity is. The challenges demand not simply sensitizing and mobilizing Christians, but more importantly re-envisioning and redefining just what constitutes "Jesus-followers" today.

White youth also often receive extensive assistance as well as tolerance when they develop drug problems. In contrast, blacks, Latinos/as, and Arab- and Southeast Asian-Americans among the stigmatized poor are without such counseling services and often simply hustled off to jail. It

The very concept of long-term confinement, a constitutive element of mass incarceration in the U.S., is made worse by overcrowded and inhumane conditions, and has been analyzed and criticized as torture.

Lockdown America, as that triadic structure of police violence, mass incarceration and the death penalty, is one key assemblage of governing forces, of the state's "jaws." Theorists

U.S. death rows, still displaying over 3,000 persons, are similarly sites of torture. After a person is sentenced to death, he or she is held in situations approximating solitary confinement, sometimes for decades, under prolonged and anguishing anticipation of the state's calculation of an execution date. Judges