Robert Chrisman

"A Black prisoner's crime may or may not have been a political action against the state, but the state's action against him is always political."

"The Black offender is not tried and judged by the Black community itself but by the machinery of the white community, ... whose interests are served by the systematic subjugation of all Black people. Thus, the trial or conviction of a Black prisoner regardless of his offense, his guilt or his innocence, cannot be a democratic judgment of him by his peers, but a political action against him by his oppressors."