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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Susan Burton
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June 10 - June 21, 2025
This book is drawn from my own life and experiences. It is also a book of memory and opinion—and memory and opinion, as we all know, may have their own stories to tell. The names and identifying details of some individuals have been changed out of respect for their privacy; the first occurrence of a changed name is indicated in the notes for each chapter that appear at the end of the book. —SB
I was doing research about the challenges of re-entry for people incarcerated due to our nation’s cruel and biased drug war.
To borrow the poetry of Maya Angelou, “And still like dust they rise.”
There’s an African proverb that says, until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.
Why are black Americans incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites? Why are prison sentences for African Americans disproportionately higher? Once released, why do people face a lifetime of discriminatory policies and practices that smother any chance of a better life?
In a state where more than half of all people with a felony conviction will return to prison, our program has a mere 4 percent recidivism rate.
The American Bar Association documented 48,000 legal sanctions and restrictions imposed upon people with criminal records, a near-impenetrable barrier denying access to employment, student loans, housing, public assistance, custody of your children, the right to vote—in many places, the formerly incarcerated are even blocked from visiting a loved one in prison.
The United States, with 2.2 million people behind bars, imprisons more people than any other country in the world. Since 1980, the rate of incarceration for women has risen more than 700 percent. The majority of these women are imprisoned for nonviolent offenses.
Three days: that’s the average time for someone to relapse after getting out of prison. I knew nothing about statistics, but I knew that, in a drug high, I could escape into silence.
In Los Angeles from 1940 to 1945, the white population rose less than 20 percent, while the black population increased nearly 110 percent. Yet only 5 percent of the city’s residential areas allowed blacks.
both the isolation and the open spaces would prove fatal design flaws, leading the Los Angeles Times to call Aliso Village the most violent neighborhood in L.A.
Bid Whist—black folks’ version of Bridge—
Unemployment rates for blacks in America are consistently twice as high as for whites. African Americans with a college education or beyond experience nearly the same rate of unemployment as whites with only a high school diploma.
Over 42 percent of African American children under the age of six live in poverty.
ear hustling
Robert Ryan.
More than 60 percent of incarcerated women report having been sexually assaulted before the age of eighteen.
More than 75 percent of incarcerated women had at least one child as a teenager.
about a starving man imprisoned for stealing a loaf of bread and a young girl he later rescues named Cosette. I couldn’t put the book down, and it made me fall in love with reading.
Watts Towers,
Mr. Fisher mysteriously reappeared. He moved us out of that rattrap and into a beautiful four-bedroom, two-bathroom house on Normandie Avenue and 42nd, a well-kept block across from the St. Cecelia Catholic church and school.
“Eat all the cherries you can, ’cause you sure don’t have one anymore.”
Black women comprise 40 percent of street prostitutes, though 55 percent of women arrested for prostitution are black, and 85 percent of women incarcerated for prostitution are black. Two-thirds of those working as prostitutes disclosed having been sexually abused as children—and more than 90 percent said they never told anyone. Only 1 percent reported having received counseling.
My sense of self was so warped that I believed my ability to divorce myself from my emotions was my greatest asset.
Other women—white women—might have gone to the police for a restraining order. But in my community, the police weren’t who we turned to for help. To willingly go to the police, you had to believe they were on your side.
Every year, 650,000 Americans are released from incarceration—a number larger than the entire population of Wyoming or Vermont.
The majority of incarcerated women are mothers of underage children. Over 40 percent of these mothers report that, upon incarceration, they were the only parent in the household.
Louise Lasser
The vast majority—75 percent—of crack cocaine users are white or Hispanic. But nearly 85 percent of people in federal prison for crack offenses are black.
Because of the crack epidemic and the harsh, racially discriminatory policies of the Anti–Drug Abuse Act, one in three black men will see the inside of a jail cell. The average time served by African Americans for nonviolent drug offenses is virtually the same as the time whites serve for violent offenses.
One in every 125 white children has a parent behind bars—for African American children, the rate is one in nine.
States with the toughest crime laws saw the largest spikes in prison population over the past two decades. California’s Three Strikes law, one of the harshest sentencing policies in the country, sent people to prison for life for offenses as minor as petty theft. At one point, “strikers” made up a quarter of California inmates, serving extreme sentences that didn’t fit the crime, on the taxpayers’ dime.
Only around 15 percent of those serving time for a drug-related offense are given access to a drug treatment program with a trained professional.
It is estimated that as many as 94 percent of incarcerated women were victims of physical or sexual abuse.
I arrived to the treatment program, the CLARE Foundation, with nothing but the clothes on my back.
Though drug use and selling occur at similar rates across racial and ethnic groups, black and Hispanic women are far more likely to be criminalized. Black women are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated for drug offenses as white women.
narcolepsy.
I began with meager goals, like doing sit-ups, things I knew could achieve if I tried. Through this, something amazing happened: I felt a sense of accomplishment.
As my sponsor, Leslie was patient and kind, leading me to find the answer rather than trying to answer for me.
Being abused or neglected as a child increases the likelihood of arrest as a juvenile by nearly 60 percent, and the likelihood of adult violent crime by approximately 30 percent.
In large urban areas such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, up to half of those on parole are homeless.
At least 95 percent of state prisoners will be released back to their communities at some point.
Sixty-five million Americans with a criminal record face a total of 45,000 collateral consequences that restrict everything from employment, professional licensing, child custody rights, housing, student aid, voting, and even the ability to visit an incarcerated loved one. Many of these restrictions are permanent, forever preventing those who’ve already served their time from reaching their potential in the workforce, as parents, and as productive citizens. “The result is that these collateral consequences become a life sentence harsher than whatever sentence a court actually imposed upon
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Erykah Badu
More than twenty new prisons opened in California from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s—compared to a total of twelve new prisons from 1852 to 1984.
Saúl Sarabia,
that the barriers were by design.
“How do you recruit residents?” he asked. I explained how I’d visit prisons, that we wrote letters to women in prison, and that I’d go meet the bus in Skid Row. “Wow, Susan, that’s such a direct and obviously effective approach,”
“It’s also an act of love.”
Cypress Park
