Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.
Interpretation
This quote highlights how systemic issues can lead to incarceration rather than individual faults.
Rachel Kushner's quote reflects on the societal and systemic factors that contribute to incarceration rates among marginalized communities. It suggests that many individuals are not imprisoned due to their unique actions or characteristics, but rather because they belong to groups that face historical disadvantages and lack opportunities. This perspective urges a deeper understanding of the root causes of crime and punishment, emphasizing the need for social change and support for those who are disadvantaged from the start.
In practice
During a talk on social justice, this quote can be cited to highlight the need for reform in the criminal justice system.
I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.
Making art was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.
There is nothing by which men display their character so much as in what they consider ridiculous... Fools and sensible men are equally innocuous. It is in the half fools and the half wise that the great danger lies.
But it's precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopelessness, in all this poision of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacillations, of resolutions adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure.
The Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story — and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.
They can send death at once, but life is slower.
Life will show you masks that are worth all your carnivals
I am good to people who are good. I am also good to people who are not good. Because Virtue is goodness.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.