A Quote by Michelle Alexander
Public housing officials are free to discriminate against you on the basis of criminal records, including arrest records. And so, you know, what you find is that even for these extremely minor offenses, people find themselves trapped in a permanent second-class status and struggling to survive.
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Public housing projects as well as private landlords are free to deny housing to people with criminal records. In fact, you don't even have to be convicted. You can be denied housing - or your family evicted - just based on an arrest.
Once you've acquired a criminal record, you can be discriminated against legally in employment, housing, and access to education and public benefits. You're relegated to a permanent second-class status, forever a 'criminal.' Inflicting this amount of unnecessary pain and suffering is not cheap.
Private landlords as well as public landlords are free to discriminate against people with criminal records for the rest of their lives. You come out of prison, and where are you expected to go?
You can make records from now 'til doomsday, and there are something like 50,000 records released every year, but the public gets to hear very few of these. They just won't know. They might be great records, but how in the world is the public supposed to find out about them?
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.
If you listen to really deep ambient records that don't move too much, very still records, long after those records are finished, you might find yourself listening for hours to the sound of the room.
If somebody wanted to go and find songs of mine to fill an iPod, that aren't on any records. They could probably find dozens of songs besides the ones that are on records.
My dad would play me all of these records: Miles Davis records, John Coltrane records, Bill Evans records, a lot of jazz records. My first exposure to music was listening to jazz records.
I think it is right for Canadians to be asked to show their faces when they're taking the oath. On revocation of citizenship, we do not let people who have criminal records, including convictions for terrorism, become either permanent residents or citizens. I think there is a limit beyond which someone has really cashed in their chips in terms of their allegiance to Canada.
I've put out records over the years, whether it's with Blackfield or No-Man or Bass Communion or Porcupine Tree, that are pop records, ambient records, metal records, singer-songwriter records.
You know, even in the economic downturn in Alberta, there are restaurants in Calgary, and even in Canmore up the mountain, that cannot open for lunch because they cannot find staff. And they cannot find staff because there's nowhere for those people to live. And so safe and decent housing, market housing, subsidized housing, the whole bit, we really, really need to have our heads on straight on this, and we don't yet.
People still come up to me and ask me to sign their records. That's right, records! Man, they don't even make records no more!
We continue to work on policy to end discrimination against people with criminal records.
When I was a bit older I had all of the George Carlin records, all of the Steve Martin records, all of the Cheech and Chong records and all of the Richard Pryor records.
Most people, from their second album on, find it much harder to be as spontaneously creative as they were with their first couple of records, and some people only have one thing that they do.
A Democratic president should propose a major permanent tax reduction on the middle class and working class. I suspect most of the public would find this attractive.
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