There is a growing consciousness of children at risk. But... there is also a growing sense of children themselves as the risk - and thus of some children as people out of place and excess populations to be eliminated, while others must be controlled, reshaped, and harnessed to changing social ends. Hence, the centrality of children, both as symbolic figures and as objects of contested forms of socialization in the contemporary politics of culture.

- Sharon Stephens, "Children and the Politics of Culture in 'Late Capitalism'"

The market economy, source of all our freedoms, focus of all of our hopes, repository of our faith in progress, now threatens to crush us. It has annulled all alternatives to itself, thereby destroying one of the most fundamental of the human needs it purports to answer - the freedom to change, to find other forms of social and economic organization, to discover fresh ways of answering need, to imagine another future, the better world which this world could have been... The cost of the leashed and diminished freedoms of the market, its celebrated "freedom of choice", can now be seen as a consolation for our own incarceration.

- Jeremy Seabrook, Consuming Cultures: Globalization and Local Lives

[I]n a time when punitive crime control measures have drastically increased, youth of color experience this hypercriminalization not only from criminal justice institutions but also from non-criminal justice structures traditionally intended to nurture: the school, the family, and the community center. Ultimately, in the era of mass incarceration, a "youth control complex" created by a network of racialized criminalization and punishment deployed from various institutions of control and socialization has formed to manage, control, and incapacitate black and Latino youth.

- Victor M. Rios, "The Hypercriminalization of Black and Latino Male Youth in the Era of Mass Incarceration"

Democracy is not an institution, but essentially an anti-institutional force, a "rupture" in the otherwise relentless trend of the powers-that-be to arrest change, to silence and to eliminate from the political process all those who have not been "born" into power... Democracy expresses itself in a continuous and relentless critique of institutions; democracy is an anarchic, disruptive element inside the political system; essentially, a force for dissent and change. One can best recognize a democratic society by its constant complaints that it is not democratic enough.

- Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualized Society