Criminal Justice Quotes

“Blind Justice II

All because

we were in the wrong place
we were in the wrong skins
we were in the wrong time
we were in the wrong bodies
we were in the wrong country
we were in the wrong
were in the wrong
in the wrong
the wrong
wrong

All because

they were in the right place
they were in the right skins
they were in the right time
they were in the right bodies
they were”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“Eyes watching through filtered screens
seeing every lie, reading every made-up word

like a black hoodie counts as a mask
like some shit I do with my fingers
counts as gang signs
like a few fights counts as uncontrollable rage
like failing three classes
counts as being dumb as fuck
like everything that I am, that I've ever been
counts as being

guilty”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“The story that I thought
was this life
didn't start on the day
I went to that park

The story that I think
will be my life
starts today

Anything that happened
before today
is only the prequel
the backstory

the story behind the story

Nothing before today matters”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“Law must never be taken as gospel – today's law may become tomorrow's crime, today's crime may become tomorrow's law.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mücadele Muhabbet: Gospel of An Unarmed Soldier

“[O]ffenses like disorderly conduct, obstruction, and resisting arrest are easily alleged, they effectively give police the power to arrest based on violations of their own sense of authority.”
― Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal

“The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and most damaging, words like 'evil' and 'soul' will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop. And crucially, the analogy holds in a key way, extending to instances of dangerous people without anything obviously wrong with their frontal cortex, genes, and so on. When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car; sure, the mechanic can speculate on the source of the problem—maybe it’s the blueprint from which the car was built, maybe it was the building process, maybe the environment contains some unknown pollutant that somehow impairs function, maybe someday we’ll have sufficiently powerful techniques in the auto shop to spot some key molecule in the engine that is out of whack—but in the meantime we’ll consider this car to be evil. Car free will also equals 'internal forces we do not understand yet.”
― robert sapolsky

“Processed

It's like I'm meat or wheat
Made into a burger or deli slices
Made into pasta or bread
Processed
Not the boy I was before the machine
Before the braking down and pulling apart
Before the adding and taking away

I was made for easy, fast consumption
Like food chains in the hood
Umi said don't go there
That you are what you eat

Those jails that system
has swallowed me whole”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“They call it free time
and it's the biggest lie
because we are
still here”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“Saying down with the blacks but uplift the white race
Raising the banner to the sun in haste
Mobbed deep, hoods and capes
Sun-dried and bloodstained
Saying down with the blacks but uplift the white race

Unjustly tried an indelible conviction
the usual result of five shades of darker skin
Justice unjust, black robes and pale face

Didn't have a chance, they called us apes
I wish I would have known the false smiles
Evil intentions fulfilling their taste
Why me? Why us?
Justice unjust, black robes and pale faces?”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“Try a crime you end a criminal, treat an environment you end crime.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sleepless for Society

“Many types of treatment claim to be about fixing the so-called problems of madness. The real problem is that certain ways of experiencing the world are seen as categorical threats— to normativity, to capitalism, to hierarchy, to the system itself. And our society's answer to a perceived threat is, of course, confinement.”
― Maya Schenwar, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

“The world needs less cops and more teachers. Law enforcement only produces an illusion of order, it's the teachers who can create a crime-free society.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“Ni inbillar er att en oskyldig dödsdömd är annorlunda än en vanlig dödsdömd, men det är ju inte alls fallet, eftersom bilorna i bägge fallen är identiska, eftersom bödelns obarmhärtighet i bägge fallen är like stor, eftersom han i världens ögon är lika skyldig som den skyldige.”
― Stig Dagerman, Processen ; Anarkismen ; Vår nattliga badort ; Den dödsdömde

“Once people with epilepsy were virtuously punished for their intimacy with Lucifer. Now we mandate that if their seizures aren’t under control, they can’t drive. And the key point is that no one views such a driving ban as virtuous, pleasurable punishment, believing that a person with treatment-resistant seizures 'deserves' to be banned from driving... it is important to remember that some, many, maybe even most of the people who were prosecuting epileptics in the fifteenth century were no different from us—sincere, cautious, and ethical, concerned about the serious problems threatening their society, hoping to bequeath their children a safer world. Just operating with an unrecognizably different mind-set.”
― Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

“God, the Artist

Allah is the only artist here
And He prefers the darkest night to be his canvas

He paints the past in broad strokes, bright hues
And the memories dance all over my mind
in living color

He paints in words and voices, rhymes and rhythm
And every whisper, every conversation beats a drum
in my mind
at full blast

He paints in wrong choices, regrets, and broken dreams
And every acquaintance, friend, and enemy laughs at me
in my mind
really, really loud”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“The use of guns and militarized equipment undermines the basic ethos of school as a learning environment and replaces it with fear and control.”
― Alex Vitale

“If the Cops are asking your permission, they need your permission, so you can refuse; but don't yell at them "I know my Rights!", instead ask gently: "Is it ok if I say 'no'?”
― Curtis Elmore, Black and Blue Lives

“Once people understood that wrongful convictions were occurring regularly in homicide and rape cases, a widespread consensus developed that innocent people should not be convicted of serious crimes. Dozens of innocence projects sprang up around the country, while some prosecutors’ offices established conviction integrity units to identify and prevent wrongful convictions. But that consensus does not yet extend to petty offenses. Many individual judges and lawyers already realize that innocent people are routinely pleading guilty to petty crimes, but the system nevertheless proceeds apace. Innocence projects almost never take misdemeanor cases, and there are scarcely any exonerations. All this even though the risks to accuracy are obvious and extreme. We know that innocent people are being convicted. It is an essential and defining aspect of misdemeanor culture that almost no one cares.”
― Alexandra Natapoff, Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal

“The same factors that propelled mass incarceration - racism, "law and order" politics, the war on drugs, the destruction of the social safety net - also propelled mass supervision.”
― Maya Schenwar, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

“One of the main uses of most criminal justice systems is to minimize the number of people who are not white, by imprisoning innocent males who are neither white nor gay.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Don’t judge a book by its cover because the criminal justice system is already overcrowded as it is.”
― J.S. Mason, A Dragon, A Pig, and a Rabbi Walk into a Bar...and other Rambunctious Bites

“You can say these women should never have committed crimes in the first place. The truth is many of them never went to trial; they accepted pleas. Their only mistake was brushing too close to the fringes of Oklahoma law, which succeeds in doing what it does best—throwing women in cages.”
― Carol Mersch, Guilty When Black

“Redemption is an age-old concept rooted in many religions. It is a concept that presupposes that we will all make mistakes, and for some, that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime. Yes, there must be consequences and accountability. But after that debt to society has been paid, is it not the sign of a civil society that we allow people to earn their way back?”
― Kamala Harris, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey

“For the passage time cannot undo the crime of murder, since the victim is gone of from mortal reach and has no tongue or sign to forgive the one who wronged him.”
― Karen Maitland, The Gallows Curse

“Every time the cradle of justice becomes criminal, it falls upon us civilians to be justice incorruptible.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Find A Cause Outside Yourself: Sermon of Sustainability

“In medieval Europe (and even colonial America) thousands of animals were summoned to court and put on trial for a variety of offenses, ranging from trespassing, thievery and vandalism to rape, assault and murder. The defendants included cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, slugs, swallows, oxen, horses, mules, donkeys, pigs, wolves, bears, bees, weevils, and termites. These tribunals were not show trials or strange festivals like Fools Day. The tribunals were taken seriously by both the courts and the
community.”
― Jason Hribal, Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance

“One stop Legal Solution at SS LEGAL CONSULTANTS PAKISTAN”
― SS LEGAL CONSULTANTS

“Law is like a band-aid. Band-aids don't heal the wound, they only prevent further infection while your natural immune system does the healing. Likewise, law doesn't cure crime, it only keeps crime in check, while individual accountability treats the inhumanity that causes crime. And at some point the band-aid must come off, because, just like a body covered in band-aid is the sign of a sick person, a society covered in law is the sign of a sick species.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“Government of baboons invests in police 'n defense contracts, while a truly civilized government invests in education.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“Society that empowers teachers empowers peace. Society that empowers police empowers malice.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission