Bethany Moriarty

“But the problem with looking back when you should be walking ahead is that you usually end up walking into something that hurts.”
― Megan Hart, Broken

“The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Sometimes when things break, you can hold them together for
a while with string or glue or tape. Sometimes, nothing will hold
what’s broken, and the pieces fly all over, and though you think you
might be able to find them all again, one or two will always be
missing.
I flew apart. I broke. I shattered like a crystal vase dropped on a
concrete floor, and pieces of me scattered all over. Some of them I
was glad to see go. Some I never wanted to see again.”
― Megan Hart, Dirty

“Those of us who hope to be their allies should not be surprised, if and when this day comes, that when those who have been locked up and locked out finally have to chance to speak and truly be heard, what we hear is rage. The rage may frighten us; it may remind us of riots, uprisings and buildings aflame. We may be tempted to control it or douse it with buckets of doubt, dismay or disbelief. But we should do no such thing. Instead, when a young man who was born in the ghetto and who knows little of life beyond the walls of his prison cell and the invisible cage that has become his life, turns to us in bewilderment and rage, we should do nothing more than look him in the eye and tell him the truth.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness