Maya Moore Quotes

Black and brown communities are significantly and disproportionately impacted by deficiencies in our criminal justice system.

America should be ashamed to say they have the best justice system in the world when, every day, race plays a part in who goes to prison, who don't go to prison.

I'm not excusing crime or those who bring poison into the community, but I do want brothers and sisters in prison to know someone cares.

Prison opened my eyes to so many things. It was a great time. I met interesting people. I got to understand the behaviour of the police and the media. I am an observer of the human race.

We think it's OK for us to have the world's largest prison population and for one racial group to be overrepresented therein.

Blacks - and critically. black elites - remain skeptical of the procedural fairness of the criminal justice system, while white elites, Democrats and Republicans alike, are more willing to embrace a “law and order” approach to criminal law enforcement.

I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It's not academic for me.

Our criminal-justice system has for decades been infected with a mindset that views black boys and men in particular as a problem to be dealt with, managed, and controlled.

We rarely know what motivates somebody in their work, and it's usually a particular moment in their life. For me, that moment is my brother's incarceration and the ways in which this country has decided to neglect, abuse, and sometimes torture people with severe mental illness, especially if they're black.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.

You cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

The second time I went to jail, I was like, 'Okay, this is not the move.'

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

We have too many Black men in jail waiting for justice and too many Black women in church waiting for Jesus.

Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and "disappears" people we fear or hold in contempt — with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste.

No penal or political system which multiplies the population of the prisons at the rate of 10 per cent every year will solve a problem which is growing to be more and more of a danger to the social and moral life of the nation.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

Too many Americans are going to too many prisons for far too long.

Our proclivity for incarceration costs American taxpayers about $80 billion a year. And that doesn’t count the vast indirect costs visited upon the incarcerated, their families and communities.

If we have to build more prisons, it means we have failed.

We need to rethink a system that has targeted young people, particularly young people of color, for nonviolent crimes.