As far as i was concerned, the police in the Black communities were nothing but a foreign, occupying army, beating, torturing, and murdering people a… - Assata Shakur

Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren’t planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World people.

we who rip off billions of dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.

I thought about it all the way home. Of all the things I had wanted to be when i was a little girl, a revolutionary certainly wasn’t one of them.