There can be many bars, wires that keep a person trapped. All of them don't have to have been created for the purpose of harming or caging the bird, but they still serve that function.

The mythology around colorblindness leads people to imagine that if poor kids of color are failing or getting locked up in large numbers, it must be something wrong with them. It leads young kids of color to look around and say: "There must be something wrong with me, there must be something wrong with us. Is there something inherent, something different about me, about us as a people, that leads us to fail so often, that leads us to live in these miserable conditions, that leads us to go in and out of prison?"

Black men in ghetto communities (and many who live in middle class communities) are targeted by the police at early ages, often before they're old enough to vote. They're routinely stopped, frisked, and searched without reasonable suspicion or probable cause.

Our system of mass incarceration is better understood as a system of racial and social control than a system of crime prevention or control.

Nationwide, 1 in 3 black men can expect to serve time behind bars, but the rates are far higher in segregated and impoverished black communities.

The dramatically different manner in which we, as a nation, responded to the crisis presented by drunk driving and the crisis caused by the emergence of crack cocaine speaks volumes about who we value, and who we view as disposable.

The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.