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.
You have someone like Colin or many of the other athletes who have knelt, especially athletes of colour, and if you're not respecting what they're saying, if you're not believing their charges of police brutality or racial inequality, you're saying that they're lying.
What does it say about our society that we invest more in a golf course than the homes of Black and brown Americans?
If you don't have a lens that's been trained to look at how various forms of discrimination come together, you're unlikely to develop a set of policies that will be as inclusive as they need to be.
I hope that audiences understand that there is a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address, that there has always been a precariousness to black lives in this country that we need to address. In fact, our country is built on the precariousness of black lives, the disposability of black lives.
It is devastating that jail is seen as a rite of passage for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, part of the natural order of things. It is an outrage that there is an attitude that this is normal. This is not normal. We can't shrug our shoulders and say this is just a 'fact of life' in remote Australia.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the U.S. has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable.
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