Certainly youth of color, particularly those in ghetto communities, find themselves born into the cage. They are born into a community in which the rules, laws, policies, structures of their lives virtually guarantee that they will remain trapped for life. It begins at a very early age when their parents themselves are either behind bars or locked in a permanent second-class status and cannot afford them the opportunities they otherwise could.

I think it's critically important that the people who have been most harmed by mass incarceration, by mass deportation, by neoliberalism, by all of it, not only have a voice in crafting these platforms but emerge and are supported as real leaders in these movements.

If the drug war was waged in those communities it would spark such outrage that the war would end overnight. This literal war is waged in segregated, impoverished communities defined largely by race, and the targets are the most vulnerable, least powerful people in our society.

For many, whether they go to prison or not is far less about the choices they make and far more about what kind of cage they're born into.

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

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

Once you have been branded a criminal or felon, you are typically trapped for life.