Condemned Criminal Origins Quotes

you think about it, our easy reliance on carceral logics in schools is especially sad. After all, shouldn’t schools—allegedly places dedicated to learning, nurturing, and understanding child development—be the first place where it occurs to us to address problems through care, compassion, and gentle inquiry rather than through punishment and containment? To the contrary, Black and Native people have been criminalized—labeled “dangerous people”—in schooling spaces throughout history. Like a perpetual motion machine, this allows carceral logics to sustain themselves: school becomes the place where they are routinized and made acceptable beyond questioning at an early age, impressing upon both children and the adults charged with caring for them that this is the only way things can possibly work. That normalization is cast upon the rest of our society, which in turn fails to condemn everyday acts of punishment and disposal enacted against children because these acts are seen as inevitable necessities.

Condemnation' is a word of tremendous import; and it is well fairly to look at its meaning, that we may the better understand the wondrous grace that has delivered us from its power. Echoing through the gloomy halls of a human court, it falls with a fearful knell upon the ear of the criminal, and thrills with sympathy and horror the bosom of each spectator of the scene. But in the court of Divine Justice it is uttered with a meaning and solemnity infinitely significant and impressive. To that court every individual is cited. Before that bar each one must be arraigned. "Conceived in sin, and shaped in iniquity," man enters the world under arrest  an indicted criminal, a rebel manacled, and doomed to die. Born under the tremendous sentence originally denounced against sin: "In the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die;" or, "You shall die the death," he enters life under a present condemnation, the prelude of a future condemnation. From it he can discover no avenue of escape. He lies down, and he rises up  he repairs to the mart of business, and to the haunt of pleasure, a guilty, sentenced, and condemned man. "Cursed is every one that continues not in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them," is the terrible sentence branded upon his brow. And should the summons to eternity arrest him amid his dreams, his speculations, and his revels, the adversary would deliver him to the judge, the judge to the officer, and the officer would consign him over to all the pangs and horrors of the "second" and "eternal death." "He that believes not, is condemned already." My dear reader, without real conversion this is your present state, and must be your future doom.