“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.”

“Prison is like high school with knives.”

“If you've ever wondered how many prisons need to operate withinin America, just look at the literacy rate. 60% of America's prison inmates are illiterate and 85% of all juvenile offenders have reading problems.”

“There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.”

“She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.”

“In the penal system, where many of these people would eventually end up, the rapidly growing problem of petty crime had already led to pressure for harsher, more deterrent policies in the state prisons. Administrators and prison experts had argued in the last years of the Weimar Republic for the indefinite imprisonment or security confinement of habitual criminals whose hereditary degeneracy, it was assumed, rendered them incapable of inprovement. Security confinement was increasingly thought to be the long-term answer to the buden thse offenders supposedly imposed on the community.”