Joshua McCoy

“True accountability is not neutral—it is a set of actions as equal and opposite as possible to the wrongful actions committed by the person who caused harm. It is the active exercise of power in the opposite direction of harm; as such, it is a force for healing.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Survivors therefore need something from those of us committed to them. If it is true that survivors are a far wider-ranging group of people than we know, if it is true that incarceration does not consistently deliver safety and almost never delivers healing, if it is true that basic things like validation, control, and a coherent narrative are necessary elements for coming through trauma, if it is true that survivors who are given options almost always choose anything other than prison, if it is true that millions of survivors tell us again and again every time they do not call the police that what the criminal justice system has to offer does not work for them, then it does seem to follow that survivors absolutely, urgently need all of us to end mass incarceration. It may be the only practical thing we can do in their names.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Committing violence is a choice we make that is rooted in our values, beliefs, expectations, and experiences, and constrained by our contexts. When people are given the opportunity to consider and transform those values, beliefs, expectations and experiences, even within the persistent constraints of harmful or oppressive contexts, they can make different choices.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“When Menachem Begin visited America soon after the creation of the Israeli state in 1948, a letter to the New York Times signed by 28 Jewish liberals and progressives, including Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, denounced him as a “terrorist, right-wing chauvinist.” His movement, the letter stated, was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy, and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties. … Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead, they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model.”[43”
― Richard Becker, Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire