Mark Lewis Taylor > Quotes

“At its best, the expression crucified God reminds us that the power of all life, God, faces and suffers some of the worst that a creature can endure and emerges with newfound power, strength, and hope. What is sacralized or made holy is not suffering but the facing and endurance of suffering with hope and life.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Whites generally are unable or unwilling to acknowledge how structural patterning generates white bias and responsibility for that structural patterning. Perhaps it is Mumia Abu-Jamal who again has deftly and complexly summarized the phenomenon of viciously racist bias in relation to African American experience of “criminal justice.” Contemplating Pennsylvania’s death row population which was 60 percent black at the time of his writing in a state where blacks make up only 11 percent of the population, Abu-Jamal reflects: Does this mean that African-Americans are somehow innocents, subjected to a set up by state officials? Not especially. What it does suggest is that state actors, at all stages of the criminal justice system, including slating at the police station, arraignment at the judicial office, pretrial, trial and sentencing stage before a court, treat African-American defendants with a special vengeance not experienced by white defendants.[94] Hence, we have the prison house and criminal justice structures as a bastion of white racism, displaying severe racial disparities, unequally disseminating terror and group loss for racialized groups in the US. It is a bitter fruit of the nation’s legacy of four centuries of slavery in North America, of the Jim Crow rollback of Reconstruction that often was reinforced by lynching practices. Some of today’s prisons are, in fact, built on sites of former slave plantations.[95] More importantly, prisons today are institutions that preserve a white society marked by white dominance and the confinement of nonwhite bodies, especially black bodies, exposing those bodies to commodification, immobilization, and disintegration.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“By 2001, United States police violence and brutality had been roundly denounced, decried, and documented by Amnesty International and others as out of compliance with international law. United”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“The crucified God takes believers on a journey into earth, into its pain and suffering, and finds in that journey not the holiness of pain but the wonder of life's power to persist and transform. The way of the crucified God seeks God in earth's humanity, which has been abandoned, rejected, and despised, the people who know life amid their struggle.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor , The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, respectively the Chair of the Board and Executive Director of Just Detention International (JDI), one of the most intrepid organizers against prison rape and for implementation of PREA, cites analyses in 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports, showing that there are over 216,600 cases of sexual abuse in prisons in a single year. They continue, “that’s almost 600 people a day—25 an hour.”[113] The most vulnerable among all groups are trans persons, the increasing number of mentally ill that have been taken in by the prisons, and also women. Nearly half of these violations, according to still more recent BJS studies, are committed by prison staff, the very ones, observes JDI pointedly, whose job it is to ensure their safety from such violation.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Often overlooked are the ways prison culture systematically maintains and nurtures rape culture, targeting women and men made to be women. Again, members of LGBT and trans communities suffer especially egregiously in prison,[111] since they directly challenge the heteronormativity maintained by hegemonic masculinism.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Mark’s story of Jesus’ last days . . . is an intensely political drama, filled with conspiratorial backroom deals and covert action, judicial manipulation and prisoner exchange, torture and summary execution . . . And we do well not to forget that this very narrative of arrest, trial and torture is still lived out by countless political prisoners around the world today. Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“We are trapped in the jaws of something shaking the life out of us.” With these words from his historical novel, Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar Wideman conveys a sense of what it means to be caught out on stage, vulnerable at the point of having one’s life taken, shaken out, by what I have term “the theatrics of state terror.” Wideman’s”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“White citizens, and others who think themselves among the “safe” echelons of the white overclass may routinely dissociate themselves from the sufferers of militarized police violence today by viewing them through a white racist lens that sees them as transgressive or problematic: “They must have done something.” Such a racist lens is powerful. According to the Pew Research Center, in the flagrant case of the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, only 37 percent of whites thought that the shooting death of this unarmed young Black man, who was then left to lie in the street for four hours, raised “important issues about race that need to be discussed.”[162] Whatever the assessment of race as a factor, the shooting death by the police and their leaving the body on site for four hours constituted a dramatic display of brutal and callous force.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Structural racism works—if I could summarize all too briefly—by stereotyping peoples and then routinizing socially experienced outcomes that are violent and destructive, often exposing members of racially-marked groups to slow or sudden death.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Time in prison—not just in solitary—becomes “a thick dull mallet that pounds consciousness into a coma.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Given the historical embedding of Lockdown America in the historical terror of slavery and Lockdown America’s current perpetuation of corporate power, white racism, and misogynist and sexual repression, I propose that if Lockdown America is not dismantled all of us today will be presented with an increasingly cruel choice: either we will become compliant parts of an expanding overseer culture that becomes ever more brutal and so renders us brutes, or more and more of us will ourselves know the lives of the enslaved. To avoid facing that cruel choice it is imperative now to challenge Lockdown America at its roots and with every practical and theoretical resource at hand, whether these be political, social, economic, or religious and theological. This will mean also challenging the U.S. militarized corporate oligarchy and its imperial pursuit of global sovereignty abroad. To this additional challenge I now turn.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“A 2014 study, Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies not only confirms the reality of cumulative racial bias in criminal justice systems suffered acutely by African Americans and by other people of color, it also links this bias to entrenched stereotypes in dominant white culture generally, finding that: White Americans are more punitive than people of color. Whites routinely overestimate how much crime is actually committed by African-Americans and Latinos, and woefully underestimate the comparably much higher level of drug use and distribution perpetrated by members of their own white group. White dominant media’s crime coverage fuels racial perceptions of crime. Policy-makers’ actions and statements amplify the public’s racial associations of crime. Criminal justice practitioners also operate with and reinforce racial perceptions of crime.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“That is to say, all of the dimensions of the theatrics of terror are modes of “carceral violence.” They are ways the state confines, immobilizes, and subjects bodies and communities to disintegration. Because this is done in ways that have focused primarily on black and brown communities, the racial disparity in the application of force and terror is itself a form of “carceral violence.” As the “outer extreme of carceral violence” the death penalty is therefore not in a separate domain of the public order from these other modes of state violence; it is more like the most encompassing concentric circle of the multiple circles of violence at work in the carceral state. It is “outer” in the sense of being the occasional publicly displayed event, a calculated performance that specifies a time, date, process, and mode for a particular act of state killing. This is distinct from the more continuous and sporadic police violence and killing, and distinct, too, from the mass incarceration that disseminates death and torture in a slower mode, on an “installment plan,” as we have noted.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“United States police have repeatedly been found to use torture in their apprehending and detaining practices, and specific techniques designed by U.S. city police forces have shaped the reigning forms of torture used by U.S. CIA and other government security forces.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Correctional officers, who lack resources for caring for the elderly, are also systematically hostile to providing medical treatment of prisoners, even though “the graying of the prison population has become a national epidemic afflicting states around the country—from California to Missouri to Florida.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“The symbol provides a spectacular drama wherein collectivized and concentrated dark bodies enable white communities to isolate transgression, and transgressive bodies, locating those bodies away from the allegedly purer and safer regions whites think they inhabit. Racial disparity and stereotype is thereby naturalized, appearing to white minds—and sometimes to some peoples of color themselves—as simply a way of marking social fault and transgression. At”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“This way of treating the mentally ill is a national crisis, an “ongoing and spreading nightmare” across other states. Prisons today serve as the largest mental health institutions in 44 of 50 states. Dart notes that nationally, “10 times as many mentally ill individuals are currently incarcerated as reside in our state hospitals.”[66] Many psychiatric hospitals and facilities have been closed, as have our schools, while prisons continue being built.[67] Dart cites the National Alliance on Mental Illness, reminding that “states collectively cut $4.35 billion in mental health spending between 2009 to 2012.” While there are violent-prone mentally ill in the jails, these, Dart emphasizes, are the exceptions: “These mentally ill are not hardened criminals. The vast majority of these inmates are charged with low-level crimes of survival: prostitution, trespassing, disorderly conduct. Many are facing drug charges . . . They are, for the most part, good people who suffer from an illness beyond their control and simply need their government to have its priorities straight.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“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,”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“The average citizen, with little familiarity of daily practice in prisons, may find it hard to believe that a systematically nurtured and tolerated rape culture exists in U.S. prisons. To be sure, no administrative guidelines in correctional institutions’ manuals suggest or allow for the practice. Many, if not most, supervisors, guards, and other prison personnel present themselves as good citizens trying to do a tough job, and many of them may do so. At the heart of many barbaric systems, however, there often have been significant numbers of basically kind individuals, who yet could not or will not challenge or alter the barbarity of the system. At”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“The filaments that connect the qualities and dynamics “inside” prisons to those on the “outside” remind those of us on the outside (or, as one former prisoner said to me, “in the outer prison”) that, in spite of real differences, in a profound sense “the prisons are us.” Even the most brutal among the imprisoned, as James Gilligan argues in his book Violence (where he draws on years of experience as a prison psychologist in a maximum security facility for violent offenders) are people who are confined there often because of their experience of brutality and terror in home and family, these latter embedded often in the structures of violence that are social, political, and economic in nature.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“The problems I write of in this section do not focus on only violent practices inside correctional facilities, detention centers, or federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Just as importantly, these internal dynamics are significant because they express and reinforce sexual inequality and gender injustice in the larger society.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“What Parenti and others have termed a “political theatrics of terror” includes also the military policing exercises intensified in the 1990s along the U.S. border region with Mexico. Operation Last Call—a vigorous round up of “Mexican-looking” people (they could be light-skinned African Americans, Chinese American, Caribbean, or other people of color, or even just white folk travelling with such)[156]—was a statewide assault by the then U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Now, after 9/11, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) runs similar operations, and was at the forefront of immigrant deportations throughout the Obama presidency.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Two-thirds of imprisoned women in the U.S. are women of color. Black women represent 30 percent of all incarcerated women, and their incarceration rate since 1986 has increased by 800 percent, more than twice the increase of 400 percent for women of all races. Only 36 percent of all women imprisoned in 2009 were for violent crime; the rest are enduring the violent ordeal of imprisonment for nonviolent offenses. The vast majority of incarcerated women are mothers to over 1.8 million children. With”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“We have a system of terrorizing punishment meted out directly to more than two million people in prison and to another five million or more under surveillance and supervision in parole, probation, and other correctional supervision, because unequal distribution of property and general economic disparity would have reached nearly unmanageable levels without these institutions of discipline. The racialized police violence we see today in the U.S., and which grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s, becomes most acute in times when wealth is being funneled upwards, leaving poorer groups in new conditions of desperation and vulnerability.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“By Christianity’s own traditional logic, we are compelled to face and to meditate on a figure who entered into Rome’s and Palestine’s state-sanctioned theatrics of terror. We”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Especially noteworthy is Foucault’s concluding reminder that our prisons and punishments are intrinsically a part of society’s numerous other modes of disciplining.[196] Society exercises discipline not only in its institutions of punishment (prisons and jails), but also in preschools and other educational institutions, in the workplace, on side-walks and highways, through social mores about sexuality and marriage, in medical institutions, insurance provisioning, zoning laws, through repeated exposure to mass media images, in organizations for the mentally ill—even in defining what qualifies as a “crime.” All of these make up an elaborate network that shapes and disciplines bodies and their everyday performance. Foucault”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“Investigative journalist Chris Hedges citing ACLU statistics notes that between 1970 and 2015 U.S. prisons have mushroomed by 700 percent.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“It is cynical, often hypocritical, and self-defeating to declare all drug offenders violent and then withdraw from them, especially from the poor among them, the resources needed to redress the problems that create drug use.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America

“For those critics who think somehow that prisons are “coddling” prisoners, that they have it too easy, I suggest such critics spend some time reading the court cases investigating prison conditions, showing the deprivations of even the most basic requirements of mental and physical health. These cases are now too numerous and the practices of degradation too entrenched to ignore.”
― Mark Lewis Taylor, The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America