Invincible - The Door lyrics

[Intro] Freedom is breathing the fresh air And the feeling of rain on the face As you came in this place Yet shamed and disgraced The plan was the state Made sure she caught the blame in the case Another number without a name or a face 2 million filling their prisons Now they claimed it was safe [Verse 1] Prison bars start looking like bar codes Freedom of soul Case closed By an arm in a dark robe banging a gavel To send you traveling carloads On gravel and stark roads Like cargo To a place where the heart grows cold You hear another prison door slam shut By hard-nosed politicians making commission Off of starved souls and Prisons monopolize the cash flow Go directly to jail and do not pa** go I'm bound to get locked down Than in a gown, cap, and ta**el Profiled the suspect Handcuffed and shackled The most attacked and ha**led By the cops in the hood Though you at the top of the hood And in the back with the la**o/lahso The apso's gotta fill their quota of stocked goods I might get the axe like chopped wood It's not looking good When the 5-0, the P.O.s, the D.A.s The C.O.s are in large with the CEOs They business partners [Hook] Come out with your hands up Put 'em in handcuffs We got locked You hear another prison door slams shut The door to opportunity closes As it grows, the net profit it grosses Come out with your hands up Put 'em in handcuffs We got locked You hear another prison door slams shut The door to opportunity closes And then another prison door slams shut [Verse 2] He used to beat her mercilessly But they wasn't coming around when she called the emergency They said the state couldn't intercede Until she made him bleed Then they charged her in the first degree Another door to opportunity closes She discloses that she had a felony charge On an application for a job Its determination What's she gonna do to survive? There's no public a**istance when you've got a drug conviction Listen, you hear another prison door slam shut Mandatory minimums Can't ignore these are women Living in unsanitary conditions With strip searches by male guards On cell blocks Don't be shell-shocked When I spit verses The door to opportunity closes When mothers lose custody And nothing's for free In the home of the brave Where we get enslaved If we don't behave [Hook] [Verse 3] Who's the enemy? The women we define as criminals? Corporate crimes get a slap on the wrist And defined as political Say farewell to welfare No one else hears It falls upon deaf ears Wage is minimal Get down on (?) The war on poor Drugs, and terrorism Is a war on the Democracy we never had Just look at Florida Elections get obtained and extorted Foreigners detained and deported Over the border, facts distorted Putting people in a cage Judge 'em with your legal ways Lethal injection is modern-day lynching Ain't it a shame We ain't taking preventative measures Like building better schools And starting a needle exchange So when you locking people up You imprison yourself More than a prisoner who lives in a cell Your fear of losing your false sense of security and material wealth Got you a life sentence to a living hell We tipping the scales And then you hear a prison door open We kicking down the door, now it's broken We fighting for this freedom and hoping Saying live from the D to Oakland No more prisons in the '04! No more prisons in the '04! Say, no more prisons in the '04! No more prisons in the '04! [Outro: Angela Davis] You know, the 13th amendment abolished slavery for all except those who are being punished for committing a crime So in a lot of ways what we see in the penitentiary system in this country is the continuation of the system of slavery But the question is creating some new institutions, institutions that really will speak to the problems that people have, who go to prison. Rather than this prison system, which continues to reproduce the problems for which people are sent to prison