17 Quotes by Jill Leovy

She sensed that they expected her to fall apart, but she didn't know how to fall apart. She knew it was strange. She looked the same despite this massive piece of herself that had gone missing. She acted the same. She went to work, greeted people, went home. Everything normal on the outside, except the occassional muffled crying on the job.

He presented justice as a psychological relief.

He presented justice as a psychological relief...

Before anything else, Bryant was black. To Devin Davis, that meant he was killable.

Fundamentally gangs are a consequence of lawlessness, not a cause.

This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic. African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation’s long-standing plague of black homicides.

White people “had the law,” to quote a curious phrase that crops up in historic sources. Black people didn’t. Formal law impinged on them only for purposes of control, not protection. Small crimes were crushed, big ones indulged – so long as the victims were black.

When you see the suffering and pain that it brings, you’d have to be blind, mad, or a coward to resign yourself to the plague. ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague.

Death was bad enough. The death of a child, unbearable. But the murder of a child? There was nothing worse.