29 Quotes About Prison-industrial-complex

As if they are a mountaineer climbing across the great slopes of Mount Everest, meth monkeys take quite the health risk. Their minds become mush due to sleep deprivation. Like pillows with way too many hours of sleep invested into them, these minds exhaust themselves and become overworked. Like that of old television shows, their minds become reruns on repeat.

The majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them.

Negroes were constantly being arrested in the city, for crimes they committed and for crimes they did not, for rudeness or talking back or looking at a white woman, for being in the wrong neighborhood or being suspected of being in the vicinity of the wrong neighborhood. Upon conviction, many of these men were, in the words of one historian, "literally sold to the highest bidders." Convicts were much in demand as workers, and the state, not the convict, got the wage.

In Waquant's words: "Racial division was a consequence, not a precondition of slavery, but once it was instituted it became detached from its initial function and acquired a social potency all its own." After the death of slavery, the idea of race lived on/

As Iyko Day notes, Native dispossession occurs through the expropriation of land, while black dispossession is characterized by enslavement and bodily dispossession. (pg. 116)

But what exactly is primitive accumulation? It entails the creation of a labor market and a system of private property achieved through the violent process of dispossessing people of their land and ways of life so that they can be converted into workers for capitalists. (pg. 102)

The financialization of municipalities, the loss of key tax revenue streams, deindustrialization, and capital flight are the causes of the fiscal crisis—not reckless public spending. (pg. 153)

Increasingly, municipalities (and companies contracted by municipalities) are behaving like businesses, viewing residents as potential sources of revenue, as well as viewing the generation of revenue via fines as a form of productivity. (pg. 156)

However, to maintain a good credit rating during periods when revenue is lagging, municipalities must fuck over residents by implementing austerity measures such as firing public employees, cutting pension funds and health-care benefits, weakening the power of labor unions, cutting the education budget, and so forth. (pg. 175)