Nobody Quotes

“When prisons are privatized, issues of crime and justice are taken out of the realm of ethics or morality and placed squarely within the culture and logic of the free market. In doing so, the mission of rehabilitating or even punishing people is trumped by the market-driven goal of maximizing shareholder wealth. Further, market-based notions of “efficiency” prompt prisons to divest from everything but the crudest institutional resources. Healthful foods, mental health resources, and educational programs all become fiscal fat that must be trimmed by the prison in order to maximize the bottom line. In simple terms, we have created a world where there is profit in incarcerating as many individuals as possible for as little money as necessary.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Furthermore, by injecting moneymaking into the relationship between a citizen and the basic services of life—water, roads, electricity, and education—privatization distorts the social contract. People need to know that the decisions of governments are being made with the common good as a priority. Anything else is not government; it is commerce. One”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Notably, Tennessee is known as a “Right to Work” state, which, despite having the ring of a guaranteed job, is a phrase that refers to laws that ensure workers are not required to pay union fees as a condition of their employment. The “Right to Work” movement was initiated in Southern states as a way of weakening union control and, in doing so, luring factory jobs from the Rust Belt. Studies have shown that workers in “Right to Work” states tend to have lower wages, inferior health insurance, and inferior pension programs when compared to workers in states that do not have “Right to Work” laws.75”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“The 1994 Crime Bill, sponsored by Democratic senator Joe Biden, went even further, calling for more juveniles to be tried as adults, the building of more prisons, an end to the Pell Grants that had allowed inmates to earn college degrees while in prison, a “three strikes” provision mandating a life sentence upon conviction for a third federal crime, and a provision making gang membership a crime in and of itself. When Bill Clinton signed the measure into law, he ensured that the pattern of mass incarceration started by his predecessors would continue well past the end of his presidency.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“As a result, 83 percent of people currently in American jails remain there for no other reason than that they cannot afford to pay their bail.105”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“This divide is characterized by the demonization and privatization of public services, including schools, the military, prisons, and even policing; by the growing use of prison as our primary resolution for social contradictions; by the degradation and even debasement of the public sphere and all those who would seek to democratically occupy it; by an almost complete abandonment of the welfare state; by a nearly religious reverence for marketized solutions to public problems; by the growth of a consumer culture that repeatedly emphasizes the satisfaction of the self over the needs of the community; by the corruption of democracy by money and by monied interests, what Henry Giroux refers to as “totalitarianism with elections”;88 by the mockery of a judicial process already tipped in favor of the powerful; by the militarization of the police; by the acceptance of massive global inequality; by the erasure of those unconnected to the Internet-driven modern economy; by the loss of faith in the very notion of community; and by the shrinking presence of the radical voices, values, and vision necessary to resist this dark neoliberal moment.89”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“To the contrary, it is virtually indisputable that Brown made bad choices, both in the convenience store and in his subsequent interactions with Darren Wilson. But the deeper issue is that one should not need to be innocent to avoid execution (particularly through extrajudicial means) by the State. After all, theft, even strong-arm theft, is not a capital offense in the United States.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Though nuanced and thorough, Piketty’s primary thesis can be summed up quite simply: economic growth of the kind that the United States enjoyed in the industrial heyday of the late nineteenth century and the first two-thirds of the twentieth century is an outlier. During”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“For some, the expansion of prisons is an opportunity to expand political power. Prison inmates are counted among a town’s residents, creating large gains in the official town population. In Susanville, the town population has been nearly doubled by prison residency.81 With this heightened population comes increased resources for roads, schools, and public services, as well as political representation for those living outside the prison. Under”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Among Black men in their thirties, it is more likely that they have been in prison than that they have completed a four-year college degree.2”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“I see no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons,” said then California governor Ronald Reagan in response to the Mulford Act, a 1967 California gun-control bill that repealed the open carry of firearms.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“In other words, Blacks receive more of the kind of policing that puts them behind bars and less of the kind of policing that protects them from danger.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Despite the fact that Blacks and Whites use recreational drugs at roughly the same rates, Blacks are nine times more likely to be imprisoned for drug crimes than Whites, and three times more than Latinos.29”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Intensified policing, when divorced from an engagement with the public, does little to improve collective efficacy. Instead, it increases fear of crime, corrodes community-police relations, and delegitimizes police in the eyes of residents. Rather than residents feeling invested in crime prevention, they become fearful of both the criminals and the police.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“At every moment in history, oppression has been met with resistance. In every instance in which the State has consigned the vulnerable to the status of Nobody, The People have asserted that they are, in fact, Somebody. In doing so, they offer hope that another world is indeed possible, that empires eventually fall, and that freedom is loser than we think”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“The mind, when isolated from other minds, can become rigid and intolerant, a caricature of itself, but ideas -- often good ideas -- grow and develop in the presence of others.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“For many in Baltimore, as in Ferguson, the rebellions were an attempt to scar public tissue, to draw attention to a deeply troublesom and long-standing state of civic affairs. By destroying government property, they were attempting to momentarily disrupt the affairs of a state that was systematically killing them. By tearing down commercial businesses, they were aiming to strike a blow against the crippling machinery of late capitalism, which had created the conditions for social deprivation and economic vulnerability. Their actions are an extension of a long tradition of political militancy that does not dismiss nonviolence as a tactic but refuses to fetishize it as an overarching philosophy against an inherently violent state.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“When you measure the pace of recovery, a mere six hundred thousand of the six million manufacturing sector jobs lost from 2000 to 2009 have been recouped.73”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“As an illustration of the excesses of our time, all three men point to the gross inflation of executive compensation, which was 20 times an average worker’s pay in 1973 and is roughly 260 times an average worker’s salary today.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“While Flint was reconnected to Detroit’s water supply by October 2015, the damage to the pipes and to the people of Flint, in particular to its 8,567 children,30 was permanent. Officials”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Of course, few of the conservative politicians—libertarians aside—who have pushed the extension of the castle doctrine would see the clear resonance with the argument for women’s reproductive rights that would naturally flow from such an idea. After all, at its ideological core, this doctrine is about male identity, male property, and male bodies.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“On one hand, the Constitution protects minority rights. Yet on the other hand, those rights are protected by institutions that are subject to the whims of the political process, leaving them vulnerable to the abuse (or indifference) of the majority.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“There is a reason why the founding generation of American settler-colonialists, in preserving the right to a jury trial, described it as “sacred,” “inviolable,” “ancient,” and “inestimable.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Amazing though it may seem, it is estimated that 97 percent of federal cases and 94 percent of state cases end in some kind of deal.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Quotas are one of the dirty secrets of American policing, particularly in those places, like Ferguson, where ticket-writing is valued as a method of revenue generation for the department. But”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“He also repeated another theme from his original essay, one that has been little mentioned: since so much disorderly street behavior is the product of untreated mental illness and drug dependency, he suggested that “social workers” should patrol the streets along with the police. “We shouldn’t be using our jails as mental hospitals or drug rehabilitation sites.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Using a .45-caliber handgun he had hidden under his jacket, Roof shot and killed nine of those with whom he had just prayed.63 Clementa Pinckney, who was forty-one years old at the time, was among those murdered.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Clementa Carlos Pinckney rose from his seat in the South Carolina state senate chamber, in the capital city of Columbia. An unusual politician, Pinckney held master’s degrees in both public administration and divinity. In addition to representing the 45th senatorial district of South Carolina, which is comprised of parts of seven Lowcountry counties,61 Pinckney was an ordained minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Having delivered many eulogies, he was adept at helping audiences wring meaning from death, and the eulogy he gave after the passing of Walter Scott was similarly affecting.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“Simply put, there is no evidence that disorder directly promotes crime.39, 40 What the evidence does suggest, however, is that the two are linked to the same larger problem: poverty.41 High levels of unemployment, lack of social resources, and concentrated areas of low income are all root causes of both high crime and disorder. As such, crime would be more effectively redressed by investing economically in neighborhoods rather than targeting them for heightened arrests.”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond

“They were killed because they belong to a disposable class for which one of the strongest correlates is being Black. While”
― Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond