Will you deny that your jails are filled with the children of the poor, not the children of the rich? Will you deny that men steal because their bellies are empty? Will you dare to state that any of those lost sisters you speak of enjoy going to bed with ten and twenty miserable men in one night and having their insides burn like they were branded? I will not rise to your reform bait. This is your society judge Atgeld; you helped to create it, and it is this society that makes the criminal… And if the workers unite to fight for food, you jail them too… No, so long as you preserve this system and its ethics, your jails will be full of men and women who choose life to death, and who take life as you force them to take it, through crime.
Lucy Parsons
She shouted this at the Governer of Illinois, John Altgeld, at a forum, while the upper class attendees booed and hissed at her. This was sometime during the 1890’s.
(via disciplesofmalcolm)
