If you're just the person with power, exercising that power fearfully and angrily, you're going to be an operative of injustice and inequality.

In many ways, we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? And that's a very sensible question. But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill?

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.

Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.

We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.