Time & Perspective Quote by Lisa Bonet

Bonet’s line lands like a match tossed into dry brush: not a careful metaphor, but an accusation meant to make polite conversation impossible. By invoking “concentration camps,” she borrows the moral shock of a historically singular atrocity to reframe American prisons as something more than “law and order.” The intent isn’t to equate every detail; it’s to force a question most systems depend on people not asking: if a society cages populations at scale and routes certain groups there disproportionately, what does that say about the society, not just the individuals inside?

The subtext is about disappearance. “So many go in and never come out” points less to literal life sentences than to the ways incarceration breaks continuity: families severed, job histories erased, voting rights stripped, bodies marked by surveillance even after release. “Never come out” also names the political convenience of invisibility. Prisons sit physically out of sight and rhetorically off the agenda, yet they quietly reorganize whole neighborhoods.

Her final clause - “primarily they’re black and Latino” - is the hinge. It refuses the comforting fiction of race-neutral punishment and gestures toward the architecture behind the numbers: targeted policing, sentencing disparities, cash bail, and the long afterlife of segregation through criminalization. Coming from an actress, the force is cultural as much as factual: a public figure leveraging celebrity to puncture mainstream narratives that treat mass incarceration as background noise. The comparison is deliberately incendiary because incremental language has never matched the scale of the harm; Bonet is arguing that only moral emergency language might.