10 Quotes by Maya Schenwar

Monitors and house arrest aren't rehabilitative or transformative - they don't support people in making changes that would be helpful to their lives, gaining needed resources, addressing harm or violence, or confronting the social forces that affect them.

The same factors that propelled mass incarceration - racism, "law and order" politics, the war on drugs, the destruction of the social safety net - also propelled mass supervision.

our democracy is controlled by a wealthy elite. Politicians who work for the wealthy need the police to protect them from the people. And so the whole chain of command protects the killer cop. The ruling class give carte blanche to law enforcement, who in turn press down on those most stranded by the neoliberal state, the poor-- and more so, the Black poor."-- Nicolas Powers

[Trauma] freezes the soul, which is why as time moves forward, so many Black children fall bahind. They are punished more harshly and expelled more quickly... Stranded in the streets [they] are profiled as older, as a threat, as possibly carrying a weapon. When cops bully them, scare them, fuck with them, it's because our children aren't seen as part of the future."-- Nicholas Powers

Unlike prisons, psychiatric institutions can be entered voluntarily, and people often turn to them in pursuit of treatment. But when used involuntarily as prison replacements, hospitals mimic persons in eerie ways— and the most oppressed people experience the brunt of the trauma and violence.

Many types of treatment claim to be about fixing the so-called problems of madness. The real problem is that certain ways of experiencing the world are seen as categorical threats— to normativity, to capitalism, to hierarchy, to the system itself. And our society's answer to a perceived threat is, of course, confinement.

Most incarcerated parents were employed prior to their arrest, according to a 2005 study by the Urban Institute.2.

Isolation does not “rehabilitate” people. Disappearance does not deter harm. And prison does not keep us safe.

As massive numbers of homeless, hungry, unemployed, drug-addicted, illiterate, and mentally ill people vanish behind its walls, the social problems of extreme poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, drug addiction, illiteracy, and mental illness become more ignorable, too.