Douglas Posey, M.D.
AUTHOR * SPEAKER * SOCIAL ACTIVIST
713-254-5607
The Negro knows that whatever he is, whatever he becomes, he will be defined not as a man, but as a Negro; that his chances for honorable employment, decent housing, and quality education are limited by the accident of his birth.
- James Baldwin, Author
"The War on Drugs has disproportionately impacted communities of color. The emphasis on incarceration over treatment and rehabilitation has filled our prisons with low-level offenders, particularly people of color, for nonviolent drug offenses. These long sentences tear families apart, disrupt communities, and saddle individuals with lifelong burdens of criminal records that make it difficult to find employment and housing.
- Dorothy Watkins Harris, Circuit Judge
"The criminal justice system in the United States is not about upholding the law, it's about controlling a designated population, a population that is made up primarily of people of color, particularly young Black men. It's a system that profits off of human misery. Prisons are big business, and there's a vested interest in keeping them full.
- Angela Davis, Activist
The new segregation is clearly evident in our criminal justice system. Mass incarceration is in many ways analogous to Jim Crow. It regulates behavior, it constricts young people, it fractures families. It warehousing and it dehumanizes.
- Bryan Stevenson Civil Rights Attorney
We have created a vast and expensive system of racial control that functions as a contemporary system of racial caste subordination. It is a system that entraps people of color in a permanent underclass, stigmatizes them as criminals, and relegates them to a secondary status in American society. In poor communities of color, where young people are targeted by a heavily policed state and entrapped in a web of supervision and confinement that traps them and their families in a cycle of poverty, despair, and hopelessness.
- Michelle Alexander, Legal Scholar