Reuben Jonathan Miller > Quotes

“You cannot treat or arrest or, perhaps, even reform your way out of mass incarceration because mass incarceration is about citizenship, not criminal behavior, and citizenship is about belonging.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“I am a vital force among forces, and I refuse to be a victim of a prearranged destiny.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“Over half of all Americans, including nearly two-thirds of all black people in this country, have a family member who has been to prison.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“Put in criminal justice parlance, the reentry program tries to make “criminals” into “productive citizens.” They can’t change the reality these people face, so they try to change how the people who face those realities see, understand, and respond to them.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“We live in strange and marvelous times.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller

“The word 'justice' suggests some harm repaired or some truth revealed, but 95 percent of all court cases end in a plea deal after a person has spent anywhere from several weeks to several years in a cage. Of the 2.3 million people who are incarcerated, 4-% are black, 84% are poor, and half have no income at all. The 2,626 people who have been exonerated since 1989 spent an average of nine years in prison for crimes they did not commit. Nearly half are black and almost all are poor. It is clear to anyone paying attention that the legal system does not administer anything resembling justice, but instead, manages the nation's problemed populations.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“History isn't linear. Time passes from year to year, but we don't move from one victory to another until we get closer to some version of the truth or some great new world where our problems have all disappeared. We don't perfect the union, not in ways we typically talk about. To borrow words from Angela Davis, freedom is a constant struggle. In this case, the struggle is about making a world in which everyone belongs, even the people you're afraid of. The problem of mass incarceration is really a problem of citizenship. This is because citizenship isn't just about whether or not someone has a set of legal rights. Citizenship is something each of us practices in exchanges and between people at every level, because citizenship is about belonging.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“It is clear to anyone paying attention that the legal system does not administer anything resembling justice but instead manages the nation’s problemed populations.20”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“To be cut off from family for years -- to be too far away for regular visits. To watch so many of your closest relationships fray and then dissolve. To see your children grow up through family pictures. To be hungry for days at a time because the food you eat is never enough, and there is nothing you can do about it. To be isolated. To be in a place with thousands of men but to somehow feel alone. This is what it means to be socially dead. To be subected to violence and humiliation. To be shackled, one to another, during daily routines, your ability to work and provide for yourself taken away. To move in a coffle down long hallways like animals for 'feeding time' of 'meds.' To be marched away from your lover and your children every time visitation ends. To be cut off from the human community or to have no community at all -- at least, no community that might be valued by members of a free society. To have few benefits and fewer protections. To become a figure who walks the yard or haunts the neighborhood so many years after your release, unable to find work or secure a home, unable to participate in the politics of the city in the ways most people find meaningful. To have no say over where or how often you connect with people you love. To be made a 'nonperson,' in the words of sociologist Orlando Patterson, who gave us the term 'social death.' To be at once part of the wider world, through labor or punishment or as a social problem of national concern, yet to be kept just outside of it.”
― Reuben Jonathan Miller, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment, and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration