Criminalization Quotes

“Prison is for rapists, thieves, and murderers. If you lock someone up for smoking a plant that makes them happy, then you're the fucking criminal.”
― Joe Rogan

“The murder of a child by a parent is horrific and is usually complicated by serious mental illness, as in the Yates and Smith cases. But these cases also tend to create distortions and bias. Police and prosecutors have been influenced by the media coverage, and a presumption of guilt has now fallen on thousands of women—particularly poor women in difficult circumstances—whose children die unexpectedly. Despite America's preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rates of infant mortality—much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and post-partum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“The criminalization of a non-custodial in not uncommon; such extreme measures of the divorce and post-divorce process can be described as common practice. Stephen Baskerville describes this consequence of no-fault in the article, “Divorced from Reality.”
― H. Kirk Rainer, A Father and Future Felon

“A black market is the part of a free market that refuses to knuckle under to government oppression.”
― Starchild

“Once people understood that wrongful convictions were occurring regularly in homicide and rape cases, a widespread consensus developed that innocent people should not be convicted of serious crimes. Dozens of innocence projects sprang up around the country, while some prosecutors’ offices established conviction integrity units to identify and prevent wrongful convictions. But that consensus does not yet extend to petty offenses. Many individual judges and lawyers already realize that innocent people are routinely pleading guilty to petty crimes, but the system nevertheless proceeds apace. Innocence projects almost never take misdemeanor cases, and there are scarcely any exonerations. All this even though the risks to accuracy are obvious and extreme. We know that innocent people are being convicted. It is an essential and defining aspect of misdemeanor culture that almost no one cares.”
― Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal

“The integration of policing and homeless services blurs the boundary between the maintenance of economic security and the investigation of crime, between poverty and criminality, tightening a net of constraint that tracks and traps the unhoused.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor

“Classification and criminalization work by including poor and working-class people in systems that limit their rights and deny their basic human needs. The digital poorhouse doesn’t just exclude, it sweeps millions of people into a system of control that compromises their humanity and their self determination.”
― Virginia Eubanks, Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor