Carceral State Quotes

“The a priori association of blackness with guilt and criminality comforts white America by enabling people to believe that black Americans are deserving of their condition and that the livelihoods of whites are in no way bound up with black immiseration.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“I can't imagine any fairminded future person feeling there was an important moral difference between the Soviet gulag and the American one.”
― Benjamin Kunkel

“The very existence of the prison forecloses the kinds of discussions that we need in order to imagine the possibility of eradicating these behaviors.

Just send them to prison. Just keep on sending them to prison. Then of course, in prison they find themselves within a violent institution that reproduces violence.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“As the U.S. deindustrialized and the welfare state was gutted (a process that started in the 1970s), the solution to the problem of what to do with the unemployed people who had migrated to cities to become industrial workers—as well as the mentally ill people housed in hospitals that were shutting down en masse—was racialized mass incarceration.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“I grew up in a neighborhood that was impoverished and in pain and bore all the modern-day outcomes of communities left without resources and yet supplied with tools of violence. But when someone in my neighborhood committed a crime, let alone a murder, all of us were held accountable, my God. Metal detectors, searchlights, and constant police presence, full-scale sweeps of kids just walking home from school--all justified by politicians and others who said they represented our needs. Where were these representatives when white guys shot us down?”
― Patrisse Khan-Cullors, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

“In other words, their [police] survival and expansion becomes bound up with their capacity to use the police power and the court system to loot residents.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism