I don't think it's necessary to feel guilty. Because I know that I'm still doing the work that is going to help more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system, and I'm trying to use whatever knowledge I was able to acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move us forward.

I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

We can't talk about the black community. It's no longer a homogeneous community; it was never a homogeneous community.

Because it would be too agonizing to cope with the possibility that anyone, including our­ selves, could become a prisoner, we tend to think of the prison as disconnected from our own lives. This is even true for some of us, women as well as men, who have already experienced imprisonment.

When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.

We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.