We're willing to spend countless dollars putting people who need help in cages, and then when they get out we say you can't have a job, and you can't have housing, and because you don't have either, we're going to take your kids, too.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes the systemic issues surrounding incarceration and the barriers faced by former inmates in reintegrating into society.
In this quote, Susan Burton highlights the hypocrisy of a system that invests heavily in incarceration but fails to provide support for those released. It emphasizes how the lack of job opportunities and housing for former inmates exacerbates their struggles, often leading to the loss of their children, further perpetuating a cycle of disadvantage and marginalization.
In practice
In a discussion about criminal justice reform, this quote can be used to highlight the urgent need for policy changes.
People are released from prison so unprepared. They give you $200. We call it gate money. And you have to pay for a bus ticket back to L.A. You get off the Greyhound bus, downtown Skid Row, and you're supposed to make a life from that.
Many times, I left the prison thinking, 'I'm smart. I can make it. I won't get caught up again.' But you get off downtown Skid Row, and you're a target for all of the environmental harms in that area. The pain and trauma in that area is so thick, you can almost reach your hand out and touch it.
I knew hundreds and hundreds of women like me, who had traveled in and out of prison in a revolving door. They needed support and help just like I had received. And it could make a difference, just like it had made a difference in my life. I wanted to see them come back to the community and have a chance at a different life, too.
'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.
Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.
Affirmative action is the most important antidiscrimination technique ever instituted in the United States. It is the one tool that has had a demonstrable effect on discrimination... Affirmative action, by all statistical measures, has been the central ingredient to the creation of the black middle class.
What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex.
I have a wonderful, diverse, and young staff at the AAPF who pretty much work around the clock trying to figure out how we promote the idea that social justice requires us to be intersectional in our thinking and in our scope of vision.
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