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Danny Kushlick and Steve Rolles
Leigh Maddox is a lawyer and former police captain from Baltimore. After a drug gang murdered her childhood best friend Lisa, Maddox decided to join the police in the hopes of fighting drug crime. However, she soon realized that her highway stops and drug busts made no difference at all: while she ruined the lives of the people she arrested, who were largely young Black men, her aggressive policing did nothing to reduce the flow of drugs or the number of people selling them. Maddox also saw many of her police colleagues, including her beloved mentor, die in violence related to the war on drugs. Eventually, she decided to quit the corrupt, “racist machine” of policing and become a lawyer instead. Now, she defends young people accused of drug crimes and helps them get their lives on track. Maddox’s life story shows how the aggressive style of drug policing pioneered by Harry Anslinger is deeply counterproductive: it spreads violence, doesn’t truly combat addiction, deepens racial inequalities, and wastes colossal amounts of government resources.
Leigh Maddox Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Leigh Maddox or refer to Leigh Maddox . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6
Quotes
More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites. You have pressure on you from above to get results. There has to be a certain number of busts, day after day, week after week. So you go after the weak. It’s not like you are framing them—they are, in fact, breaking the law. You keep targeting the weak. And you try not to see the wider picture.
But then, for some people, it becomes inescapable.
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But on I-95, Leigh began to see the act of pulling over a car to search it in a new way. Once, she saw this scene as a soldier in a just war approaching the enemy. Now she sees it as a meeting of people who are surrounded by ghosts. As he approaches the car, the police officer has ranged behind him the ghosts of all the cops he has known, “all the funerals he’s been to, all the people who’ve been killed in traffic stops—because it’s a lot,” she says. And then “there’s also this poor black kid” in the car. Sitting in the passenger seats behind him are his ghosts—all of his relatives and friends who have been killed in police raids or vanished into the American prison system.
Neither can see the other side’s ghosts. They can only hate.
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Leigh Maddox Quotes in Chasing the Scream
The Chasing the Scream quotes below are all either spoken by Leigh Maddox or refer to Leigh Maddox . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6
Quotes
More than 50 percent of Americans have breached the drug laws. Where a law is that widely broken, you can’t possibly enforce it against every lawbreaker. The legal system would collapse under the weight of it. So you go after the people who are least able to resist, to argue back, to appeal—the poorest and most disliked groups. In the United States, they are black and Hispanic people, with a smattering of poor whites. You have pressure on you from above to get results. There has to be a certain number of busts, day after day, week after week. So you go after the weak. It’s not like you are framing them—they are, in fact, breaking the law. You keep targeting the weak. And you try not to see the wider picture.
But then, for some people, it becomes inescapable.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
But on I-95, Leigh began to see the act of pulling over a car to search it in a new way. Once, she saw this scene as a soldier in a just war approaching the enemy. Now she sees it as a meeting of people who are surrounded by ghosts. As he approaches the car, the police officer has ranged behind him the ghosts of all the cops he has known, “all the funerals he’s been to, all the people who’ve been killed in traffic stops—because it’s a lot,” she says. And then “there’s also this poor black kid” in the car. Sitting in the passenger seats behind him are his ghosts—all of his relatives and friends who have been killed in police raids or vanished into the American prison system.
Neither can see the other side’s ghosts. They can only hate.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
