Until We Reckon Quotes

“I believe when we hurt someone, we incur an obligation. Period. Nothing changes that obligation— not our own history of pain, our unhealed trauma, nothing.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Accountability requires five key elements: (1) acknowledging responsibility for one’s actions; (2) acknowledging the impact of one’s actions on others; (3) expressing genuine remorse; (4) taking actions to repair the harm to the degree possible, and guided when feasible by the people harmed, or “doing sorry”; and (5) no longer committing similar harm.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“If incarceration worked to secure safety, we would be the safest nation in all of human history.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“that sense, this book is an invitation to grief; it is also an invitation to imagination. What is possible and what we deserve will almost surely require both.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“will not work our way out of violence if we continue to believe that solving violence is about managing monsters. Nor will we do it if we continue to believe that punishment is an adequate substitute for healing.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Committing violence is a choice we make that is rooted in our values, beliefs, expectations, and experiences, and constrained by our contexts. When people are given the opportunity to consider and transform those values, beliefs, expectations and experiences, even within the persistent constraints of harmful or oppressive contexts, they can make different choices.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“At its best, accountability completes mercy in generating justice. It does so by meeting a humane restraint of power (on the part of those in the position to punish) with a humane exercise of power in return (on the part of the person who caused harm). Justice, then, exists when all parties exercise their power in a way that is consistent with the humanity of everyone involved and in the interest of the greater good. In the aftermath of violence, mercy plus accountability equals justice.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“True accountability is not neutral—it is a set of actions as equal and opposite as possible to the wrongful actions committed by the person who caused harm. It is the active exercise of power in the opposite direction of harm; as such, it is a force for healing.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Research unequivocally shows that one of the most surefire predictors of violence is surviving it. Nearly everyone who has committed harm has survived it, and few have received any formal support to heal.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Accountability is not just about being or feeling sorry— it is about a set of actions that demonstrate remorse in practice. And it is not the feeling of remorse that delivers us from our shame— it is the practice of accountability in action. It is doing sorry.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“If we act on the working definition of forgiveness as relinquishing a desire to see the other suffer, then forgiveness is deeply practical.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Survivors are often extraordinary at metabolizing just about anything into healing.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“In the aftermath of harm, survivors need to locate responsibility somewhere. When the person responsible for the harm is denying (or just not openly accepting) their role, it can be common for survivors to assign that responsibility to their own actions.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“It is my belief that when we hurt people, we owe something, and one of the things we owe is to face what we have done. In that sense, when it comes to demanding that those who have committed wrongdoing pay that debt, there is nowhere softer on crime than prison.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“On the individual level, violence is driven by shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and an inability to meet one’s economic needs—factors that are also the core features of imprisonment. This means that the core national violence prevention strategy relies on a tool that has as its basis the central drivers of violence.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Perhaps one of the greatest harms the criminal justice system has done is persuaded us that we do not know how to solve the problems that arise between and amongst us. We have been taught that our experience is inconsequential in comparison to the evidence the "experts" present, and that the strategies we gravitate towards instinctively--calling each other's families first instead of the police, addressing the underlying causes of people's behavior, requiring people to give back to those they harmed--are somehow not only wrong, but socially irresponsible.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Trauma symptoms themselves can become drivers of cycles of violence. Hyper-vigilance exxagerates survivors' sense of threat-so that a minimal threat can legitimately feel like a substantial and potentially even life-threatening one. How endangered one feels depends in part on the baseline of danger that exists. So for survivors who are hurt in the context of relative safety, their exaggerated sense of danger may result in simple self-protective actions like crossing the street when they get a bad feeling about someone approaching, holding their keys as they approach their apartment, or carrying pepper spray in their bag. For people who live where there is a more widespread, regular threat of violence, where day in and day out, they are making decisions that will affect whether or not they get home safe and alive, perceiving threats as more immediate than they are may mean that the self-protective actions people choose are graver. Not all survivors cope in this way, but many do.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“That transformation requires both personal change and change in structures: to be most durable, people have to not want to and not be able to cause the same kinds of harm again. Ensuring that the harm will not recur therefore requires a realignment of power, from those who have caused harm to those who have been harmed. With mass incarceration and violence, that realignment involves relocating the authority to define and secure safety so that it shifts from the systems that have held that power to the communities that are most impacted. It means not only shrinking systems but developing solutions that stand to displace them. And it means building political power to protect those changes from backsliding and backlash. The people whose lives are at stake will need to have the durable collective power to choose, implement and sustain solutions.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“will require that we demand and build a country where fewer people are harmed by violence and fewer people are incarcerated; place regard for human dignity at the center of policies and practices; and prioritize survivors’ needs for healing, safety, and justice. It will require that we draw on the leadership, expertise, and authority of people most impacted—including crime survivors, those who are or have been incarcerated, and the loved ones of both—and that we nurture community-led strategies that prevent and address trauma and violence, create healthy communities, and help foster protection for everyone. It will require that we make a commitment to accountability for violence in a way that is more meaningful and more effective than incarceration; engage in an honest reckoning with the current and historic role race has played in the use of punishment in the United States; and change the socioeconomic and structural conditions that make violence likely in the first place. The”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“we are serious as a nation about addressing violence and its consequences, we have to acknowledge that relying only on incarceration (or any single tool, for that matter) is not an adequate response, either morally or practically. To secure the safety of survivors and communities, we will need to implement interventions that can transform the behavior of people who have caused harm. Doing so will require an honest grappling with the limitations of our current approaches and an openness to solutions that can produce better results. And it will require prioritizing pragmatism over emotion and safety over politics in a way that runs contrary to business as usual for our country but is decidedly possible to accomplish.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“For the past decade, I have directed Common Justice, an organization that seeks to address violence without relying on incarceration. The framework used at Common Justice and explored in this book suggests that any responses to violence should adhere to four core principles. Our responses should be survivor-centered, accountability-based, safety-driven, and racially equitable.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“This framework was mobilized to keep in place various forms of disenfranchisement and inequity previously secured by Jim Crow laws but poised to be disrupted by the mounting gains of civil rights advancements.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“the lawyer and scholar Michelle Alexander has argued decisively in her now canonical text The New Jim Crow, the precipitous rise of mass incarceration in this country, couched as “the war on drugs,” was part of a continuous history of racial inequity that extends back through history to Jim Crow and convict leasing and slavery before it.35 In this latest iteration, leaders ranging from Presidents Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II, and Clinton, together with local and state legislators, enacted a strategy that blocked or reversed many of the gains secured for people of color through the civil rights movement.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“In all the world and all recorded time, no country has locked up their own people at the rate we do.23 The United States has nearly 5 percent of the world’s population and nearly 25 percent of its incarcerated people.24 More than 2.3 million people are behind bars on any given day—and the number of black people incarcerated or under correctional control exceeds the total number of adults enslaved nationwide in 1861.25 A black boy born today has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime.26 Incarceration is not just a dimension of how we punish crime in our country. It exists at such a scale that it is a defining feature of our culture. It is who we are, who we have become.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“incarceration worked to secure safety, we would be the safest nation in all of human history. We would not be a nation where, by the most conservative estimates available, every year nearly three thousand young men of color are murdered before their twenty-fifth birthday; more than 57,000 children survive sexual violence; nearly half a million women are beaten in their relationships; nearly three million men are robbed or assaulted; countless transgender people are killed for who they are; where every year, we bury our own children, gunned down in our own streets.22 If incarceration worked to stop violence, we would have eradicated it by now—because no nation has used incarceration more.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Incarceration is also limited as a tool because it treats violence as a problem of “dangerous” individuals and not as a problem of social context and history. Most violence is not just a matter of individual pathology—it is created. Poverty drives violence.2 Inequity drives violence.3 Lack of opportunity drives violence.4 Shame and isolation drive violence.5 And like so many conditions known all too well to public health professionals, violence itself drives violence.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“incarceration is an inadequate and often counterproductive tool to transform those who have committed violence or protect those who have been harmed.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“We could reasonably describe whiteness as the oldest alternative to incarceration in America.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“The history of slavery exemplifies the mutually reinforcing link between racialized dehumanization and extreme punishment.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

“Survivors therefore need something from those of us committed to them. If it is true that survivors are a far wider-ranging group of people than we know, if it is true that incarceration does not consistently deliver safety and almost never delivers healing, if it is true that basic things like validation, control, and a coherent narrative are necessary elements for coming through trauma, if it is true that survivors who are given options almost always choose anything other than prison, if it is true that millions of survivors tell us again and again every time they do not call the police that what the criminal justice system has to offer does not work for them, then it does seem to follow that survivors absolutely, urgently need all of us to end mass incarceration. It may be the only practical thing we can do in their names.”
― Danielle Sered, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair