Susan Burton > Quotes

“The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for white women is 1 in 118; for black women, it’s 1 in 19.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“Since 1980, the rate of incarceration for women has risen more than 700 percent. The majority of these women are imprisoned for nonviolent offenses.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“I was struck, though, that even as the women share their experiences, they seem to remain essentially alone in them. They tell their stories, but they do not seem to connect with the others in doing so, and in the end, the film depicts confession as empty. These women open themselves up but do not receive compassion, understanding, or closeness in the space they have freed. I wonder if this is in part why I didn't tell for so long, because of the fear of the hunger that might remain even after disclosure.”
― Susan Burton, Empty

“Three days: that’s the average time for someone to relapse after getting out of prison.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“...It wasn't that I couldn't open up; it was just that I needed to control the information. I needed to think about it in advance, I needed to look at the pages of my journal in the middle of the night and consider which ones to type.

But I was disappointed. I wished I could do it over again and feel what it would have been like not to hold back. I had been given a chance to be known, and I had not taken it...Everyone else had taken a risk...and come out closer.

...for years I'd still be standing on that stage, not knowing what I wanted, to withhold or to reveal, to yield or to protect. Refusal was safer: less risk...The gestures I committed to were self-denial and containment. But was that really what I wanted? Because for years I'd still wonder what it would be like not to hold tight...what it would be like to say.”
― Susan Burton, Empty

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“To feel wrecked, you didn’t need accumulated badness. One mess-up was all it took.”
― Susan Burton

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Empty

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“Writing...is in a way a renunciation of empty...Because I'll fill the blank white pages, I'll fill the emptiness in; and inevitably I will get it wrong, it will not be perfect. I'll feel somehow as if I've ruined it, as if I've wrecked it; and I will have to live with that. I will have to learn to live with something other than the blankness and the possibility of a future in which everything is exactly right. I will have to learn that I can feel regret, disappointment, discomfort; that I can have those feelings, any feeling, and still be okay. And maybe, finally, I will learn to feel full.”
― Susan Burton, Empty

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“Most people had a history in this region, but not my parents, and my early, defining relationship to my environment was a feeling of being not from here, even though I had never lived in any other place.”
― Susan Burton , Empty

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Empty

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“For so long I was scared to write...Once I did, I imagined who might read what I wrote. I imagined adolescent girls..., also people I was close to, and scientists. But because it felt arrogant to imagine that what I wrote might offer solace..., and uncomfortable to imagine the people I was close to, I focused on the scientists...

Science! Yes, here was a way I could make something of this experience. Here was a way I could redeem the waste...

So I hope that scientists would find my writing. But I also hoped they would find me. They would find me and say, We read your paper...But we noticed your discussion section never really arrives at a conclusion...but don't worry. We are scientists. We have already drafted a conclusion based on the evidence you provided, We think you will be pleased with our analysis. We think it will be the paragraph that makes sense of this for you.”
― Susan Burton, Empty

“I knew that my remaining "preoccupation"...was not normal. I tried to fix it, and I couldn't. At the same time, I believed someday I would fix it and that fixing it would fix everything, would be the transformation that would lead to all other transformations, to wisdom, generosity, maturity. That's what I thought even through the writing of this book. That's what I thought until I met J.

...I was telling her the metaphor I had for the...stuff, which is something from sound editing: The...stuff was a track that ran in my brain under all the other tracks. Sometimes it would get so loud that it would drown out all the other tracks; sometimes I could lower the volume, but I was never able to remove the track from the session. Deleting the track was the wrong idea, J said; lowering the volume was good, but the main thing was to boost the other tracks. Develop other strengths and ways to cope; raise the signal on all I'd neglected. This had seriously never occurred to me...it wasn't subtraction that I needed; it was addition.

How could I raise the signal on the other tracks?
"Who's the engineer?" J. said. It was just the right question.”
― Susan Burton, Empty

“It was one thing to recognize...the defining experience of my adolescence, but as a woman in my forties I hesitated to name it as the central aspect of my identity...The stories we tell about ourselves - whether for forty-five minutes at a stretch or over hundreds of pages - shape our self-inventions. What I have come to realize is that if...is at the core of my identity, it's because I've allowed it to roost there. And that the purpose of therapy isn't to ratify this identity but to redefine it.

The story I am figuring out with J. differs from the one in these pages. I fear that I might look back at this book and think: That's all wrong. Holy shit, that's so offensive! That's blind, naive, strange. You only scratched the surface. You left the most important part out...I know that will happen, and that knowledge is tormenting. But if you wait until you understand everything, you never say anything at all. You step down from the stage and spend the next thirty years wondering what would have happened if you'd revealed yourself. ..

Those sensations I always craved, light, relieved, unburdened: These are associated with the telling of secrets. But I am finding more sustenance in other sensations: transparency, alertness, generosity, and an interest in what else might be possible.

For years I came up with excuses about why therapy wouldn't be right - e.g., I didn't want someone else's language. I didn't want a psychological vocabulary replacing the words I might find to understand my experience. But, also, the illness kept me from it. The same old story: It was a risk to let anything, or anyone, in. It might contaminate me. It might compromise my integrity. But what, after all, was really compromising my integrity? The...I tried to contain in just the right prose remained in control of me.

I was still determined to go away and address this on my own without anyone knowing. I wanted to solve it in the notebook I wrote in by a little arched window and come down from the tower graceful and renewed...But now that I have finished this book, I see that I have not ended the story so much as claimed it.”
― Susan Burton, Empty

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“The American Bar Association documented 45,000 legal sanctions and restrictions imposed upon people with criminal records, a near-impenetrable barrier denying access to employment, student loans, housing, public assistance, custody of your children, the right to vote—in many places, the formerly incarcerated are even blocked from visiting a loved one in prison.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“...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.”
― Susan Burton, Empty

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

“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.”
― Susan Burton, Empty: A Memoir

“cost up to $60,000 to incarcerate a woman for one year—but, after her release, zero was invested in reuniting her with her children and providing support for the family.”
― Susan Burton, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women