I personally believe that state institutions are better off if they're not fully segregated. I think that what you've seen in Texas and California justifies the position that we took all along. I think that a lot more affirmative steps are going to have to be taken in different ways to reintegrate these institutions and to make sure the society is a structure of opportunity open to everybody. . . . I think one of the things that I'm very hopeful of in these budget negotiations, for example, is that we'll get the expansion of the empowerment zones we sought, that we'll get other things that we sought that will guarantee more investment, more jobs, and more opportunity for people. Blacks' distrust of the justice system.
People do something serious, and they're obviously hardened offenders, they ought to be punished.
But insofar as we can recognize that we can't simply keep totally jailing our way out of the problem, I think that's the beginning of wisdom. Genesis of his racial views. And I was very close to both of them until they died, one when I was 11 and the other when I was 21. And they were just small-town Arkansas people. My grandfather had a grade-school education, but maybe because they were also poor and had difficult times, they thought that segregation was wrong.