Quotes About Incarceration

There's a saying, "There are no atheists in foxholes," but it should be amended to add ". . . or in penitentiaries."* If I am ever incarcerated you can bet I'll be signing up for every form of religious education offered. They have the best snacks; they observe holidays and often meet in air-conditioned halls.

Whether you're beaten or pampered, fed the best foods or starved, kept in filth or kept clean, a cage is still a cage

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder of a political organization called Real Justice. Our goal is to help elect progressive, reform-minded prosecutors and district attorneys that are committed to ending mass incarceration.

My father was never really a big part of my life, he ended up passing away a few years ago, my biological father. And the guy I consider my dad, he was incarcerated for a crime he didn't even commit, which is part of the reason I protest.

In a system where 'innocent until proven guilty' is the ultimate maxim, a person who is charged but not yet convicted of a minor crime should not be sent to prison merely because he or she lacks the financial ability to post bail.

It costs more money to put a person on death row than it does to lock them up for the rest of their lives because of attorney fees.

Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.

I want to see somebody go to jail over the financial crisis and not just black, brown and poor whites over humbles and minor drug beefs.

It's an unfortunate fact that in the male black population, a very significant percentage of them, more so than whites or other minority candidates, because of convictions, prison records, are never going to be hired by a police department. That's a reality. That's not a byproduct of stop-and-frisk.

It's not as if I've ever been to prison or been close to going to prison. The closest I've got is knowing people who have been in jail - after all, I was a member of Parliament - and visiting them there during their sentence.

People with mental illnesses are dying on our streets. More than 350,000 are in jails and prisons. Most are people whose only real crime is they got sick.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

I am jailed, with around 200 other inmates, in a wide hall that looks like a warehouse.

The great gift of 'Incarceration Nations' is that, by introducing a wide range of approaches to crime, punishment, and questions of justice in diverse countries - Rwanda, South Africa, Brazil, Jamaica, Uganda, Singapore, Australia and Norway - it forces us to face the reality that American-style punishment has been chosen.

The greatest stain upon this great Australian nation's character, without any question, is the great gaps that exist between our Aboriginal brothers and sisters in terms of their health, their education, their living conditions, their incarceration rates and life expectancy. It's a great stain.

In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.

Jail was terrible. It was a nightmare.

Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.

Mordovian prisoners are afraid of their own shadows. They are completely terrified.

When a man sits in our jails for a number of years, and around him friends and family become angry, that is how we create terrorists.

Not to mention there are at least seven locks between you and the outside world. First lock is on your cell door. Get by

I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one's own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers, rapists, and child molesters makes one wonder whether civilization isn't simply doomed.)

Drug abuse and addiction are very real problems, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should