Quotes About Incarceration

Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.

Some of our system of mass incarceration really has to be traced back to the law-and-order movement that began in the 1950s, in the 1960s.

At both rallies I spoke at length about the need for criminal justice reform and for ending the absurdity of the United States having more people in jail than any other country on earth.

Today in America, more than 2 million people are in jail, disproportionately black, Latino, and Native American. That is a greater number of inmates than in any other country on earth—including China, which has a population four times greater than ours and an authoritarian government that does not tolerate dissent.

Estimates of the number of people killed by Stalin range from as low as twenty million to as high as sixty-two million "unnatural deaths" during Stalin's time as Soviet leader. The man who is credited with saying that "death solves all problems" and "One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic" murdered his own citizens through executions, artificial famines, forced-labor camps, incarceration, and torture.

The wrists will then also be shackled

Across the nation, there are thousands of individuals serving life or life-equivalent sentences for crimes they committed as children. This means they will likely die in prison without a chance to prove to society they are worthy of a second chance.

In the history of postwar German writing, for the first 15 or 20 years, people avoided mentioning political persecution - the incarceration and systematic extermination of whole peoples and groups in society. Then, from 1965, this became a preoccupation of writers - not always in an acceptable form.

someone with a real religious conviction is, I propose, a religious convict, and deserves locking up.

I was getting preferential treatment, they said, because my father was a cop. What else had been covered up? If I weren't a white man, I'd be behind bars already. This was racism, this was privilege, there was clearly

The fact that our legal system has become so tolerant of police lying indicates how corrupted our criminal justice system has become by declarations of war, 'get tough' mantras, and a seemingly insatiable appetite for locking up and locking out the poorest and darkest among us.

A friend of mine is chief of staff at a big prison in Georgia. Along with giving me a tour of the prison, she allowed me to meet inmates.

I support defunding the police - particularly the militarization of our police force and reallocating those resources toward public health. And not just health care but mental health support, affordable housing, education, alternatives to incarceration, non-emergency responses to those who might be in mental distress.

What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?

Nothing's wrong with going to jail for something you believe in. Remember, jail was made for people. Not horses.

Nothing's wrong with going to jail for something you believe in. Remember, jail was made for people. Not horses.

Junior was eleven. The statement is significant. There are a few peevish people in the world who believe that all eleven-year-old boys ought to be hung. Others, less irritable, think that gently chloroforming them would seem more humane. A great many good-natured folks contend that incarceration for a couple of years would prove the best way to dispose of them.

Older prisoners are more expensive for prisons to house because they tend to require more health care over time.

In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages - en masse.

I've been lucky enough to stand on both poles, but the place that seemed the remotest to me was Butugychag, a former gulag in Siberia. It is completely cut off from the rest of the world.

Most prisons in this country are in the middle of nowhere, which makes it much easier for us all to throw those people away. Out of sight, out of mind.

Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U.S. Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind, it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial progress than we actually are.

I'll tell you what I think is not okay. Have you ever seen that show on MSNBC, 'Lockup?' It's a reality show that takes place inside a prison. Do the prisoners have to sign release forms? Or do they have to be on it whether they like it or not?

Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.