Probation Period Quotes

Our sojourn in mortality is a period of probation, a time of trial and testing to see if we will do whatever the Lord commands us to do.

Imagine you are Emma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas.1 All but one of the people arrested were African American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your innocence. Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty so you can return home to your children. Unwilling to risk a trial and years of imprisonment, you are sentenced to ten years probation and ordered to pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation costs. You are also now branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least twelve years; and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your children will be taken from you and put in foster care. A judge eventually dismisses all cases against the defendants who did not plead guilty. At trial, the judge finds that the entire sweep was based on the testimony of a single informant who lied to the prosecution. You, however, are still a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain custody of your children. Now place yourself in the shoes of Clifford Runoalds, another African American victim of the Hearne drug bust.2 You returned home to Bryan, Texas, to attend the funeral of your eighteen-month-old daughter. Before the funeral services begin, the police show up and handcuff you. You beg the officers to let you take one last look at your daughter before she is buried. The police refuse. You are told by prosecutors that you are needed to testify against one of the defendants in a recent drug bust. You deny witnessing any drug transaction; you don’t know what they are talking about. Because of your refusal to cooperate, you are indicted on felony charges. After a month of being held in jail, the charges against you are dropped. You are technically free, but as a result of your arrest and period of incarceration, you lose your job, your apartment, your furniture, and your car. Not to mention the chance to say good-bye to your baby girl. This is the War on Drugs. The brutal stories described above are not isolated incidents, nor are the racial identities of Emma Faye Stewart and Clifford Runoalds random or accidental. In every state across our nation, African Americans—particularly in the poorest neighborhoods—are subjected to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods.

Probation means 'period of testing somebody's suitability; period when student must improve.

miss you and want to grieve. Frankly, I could care less about money right now. And yet, I’m worried about it too. I resent money right now. I resent all these decisions that have to be made. I resent having to talk to the bank, Social Security, insurance companies, and all the rest. Everyone wants proof of this or that. I can’t get into this or that account. I need a death certificate for this, and another one for that. There’s a waiting period for this. I have to wait on probate for that. I’m drowning in paperwork and details. I feel angry and scared. You’re not here. It’s just me now. I suddenly feel nauseated.

If a new human — a child, a spouse, a roommate, a plumber — is brought into the household, place this person on notice that he or she is on probation, and may or may not be allowed to stay. Probation may be communicated via dirty looks, disdain for any gift this person presents, and in cases of extreme distrust, a hairball — or worse — deposited in the offender’s shoe. However, if the new human shows signs of being a “cat person,” i.e., a sucker, you may choose to dispense with the probationary period before the customary six months have passed

The period of their probation was about to expire. Noah had faithfully followed the instructions which he had received from God. The ark was finished in every part as the Lord had directed, and was stored with food for man and beast. And now the servant of God made his last solemn appeal to the people. With an agony of desire that words cannot express, he entreated them to seek a refuge while it might be found. Again they rejected his words, and raised their voices in jest and scoffing. Suddenly a silence fell upon the mocking throng. Beasts of every description, the fiercest as well as the most gentle, were seen coming from mountain and forest and quietly making their way toward the ark. A noise as of a rushing wind was heard, and lo, birds were flocking from all [98] directions, their numbers darkening the heavens, and in perfect order they passed to the ark. Animals obeyed the command of God, while men were disobedient. Guided by holy angels, they “went in two and two unto Noah into the ark,” and the clean beasts by sevens. The world looked on in wonder, some in fear. Philosophers were called upon to account for the singular occurrence, but in vain. It was a mystery which they could not fathom. But men had become so hardened by their persistent rejection of light that even this scene produced but a momentary impression. As the doomed race beheld the sun shining in its glory, and the earth clad in almost Eden beauty, they banished their rising fears by boisterous merriment, and by their deeds of violence they seemed to invite upon themselves the visitation of the already awakened wrath of God.

I once saw a book in which it was maintained that embryos look upon birth much as we do upon death. No one, indeed, can say that this is not so, no one can say that we may not have had the most gloomy forebodings about birth and have forgotten them. Embryos, it was maintained in the book to which I was referring, hold birth to be a cataclysm, the end of their present life, and the entry upon a world beyond the womb of which they can form so little conception that they call it being dead. It was said that much the same arguments concerning the possibility of a future life go on among the embryos as amongst ourselves, some maintaining that they shall enter upon a new life at birth for which they shall be better or worse, qualified according as they have done their duty well or ill during their embryonic period of probation; while others say that there is no such thing as life in any true sense of the word except that in the womb, and that even though there be a life beyond it must involve so much change in personality that the embryo will no longer be able to recognise itself and remember its past existence, but will to all intents and purposes be another person. Others again say that the analogy of what an embryo can know for certain as having fallen under its own experience should teach that there is no life save as a succession of deaths, nor any death save as a succession of new births, and that strictly speaking we are neither either quite living or quite dead, though we are certainly more living and more dead at some times than at others. For the embryo has already so often changed its forms as to have died and been born anew a dozen times over before it reaches its full development, and each new phase it has probably considered to be its be-all and end-all, so that not only is it true that in the midst of life we are in death but also that in the midst of death we are in life.

The first stage is the roundup. Vast numbers of people are swept into the criminal justice system by the police, who conduct drug operations primarily in poor communities of color. They are rewarded in cash—through drug forfeiture laws and federal grant programs—for rounding up as many people as possible, and they operate unconstrained by constitutional rules of procedure that once were considered inviolate. Police can stop, interrogate, and search anyone they choose for drug investigations, provided they get “consent.” Because there is no meaningful check on the exercise of police discretion, racial biases are granted free rein. In fact, police are allowed to rely on race as a factor in selecting whom to stop and search (even though people of color are no more likely to be guilty of drug crimes than whites)—effectively guaranteeing that those who are swept into the system are primarily black and brown. The conviction marks the beginning of the second phase: the period of formal control. Once arrested, defendants are generally denied meaningful legal representation and pressured to plead guilty whether they are or not. Prosecutors are free to “load up” defendants with extra charges, and their decisions cannot be challenged for racial bias. Once convicted, due to the drug war’s harsh sentencing laws, people convicted of drug offenses in the United States spend more time under the criminal justice system’s formal control—in jail or prison, on probation or parole—than people anywhere else in the world. While under formal control, virtually every aspect of one’s life is regulated and monitored by the system, and any form of resistance or disobedience is subject to swift sanction. This period of control may last a lifetime, even for those convicted of extremely minor, nonviolent offenses, but the vast majority of those swept into the system are eventually released. They are transferred from their prison cells to a much larger, invisible cage. The final stage has been dubbed by some advocates as the “period of invisible punishment.”13 This term, first coined by Jeremy Travis, is meant to describe the unique set of criminal sanctions that are imposed on individuals after they step outside the prison gates, a form of punishment that operates largely outside of public view and takes effect outside the traditional sentencing framework. These sanctions are imposed by operation of law rather than decisions of a sentencing judge, yet they often have a greater impact on one’s life course than the months or years one actually spends behind bars. These laws operate collectively to ensure that the vast majority of people convicted of crimes will never integrate into mainstream, white society. They will be discriminated against, legally, for the rest of their lives—denied employment, housing, education, and public benefits. Unable to surmount these obstacles, most will eventually return to prison and then be released again, caught in a closed circuit of perpetual marginality.