Quotes About Incarceration

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

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Western society, and especially the United States, greatly overuses prisons. If restorative justice were taken seriously, our reliance on prisons would be reduced and the nature of prisons would change significantly. However, restorative justice approaches may also be used in conjunction with, or parallel to, prison sentences. They are not necessarily an alternative to incarceration.

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

By the end of the Clinton years, the United States had more than 2 million people in prison—a higher percentage of the population than any other country in the world, except maybe Communist China. Visions

Many fine books have been written in prison.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

What was most important, for me, is that I could share what I experience as a young person - in particular, what impact incarceration and policing had on my life and my family's life.

'Firelight' is a beautiful story about a lot of young women. My character, Caroline, is a girl who has a bad boyfriend, and he ends up getting her locked up and incarcerated.

If you go to prison, your child support adds up.

Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new and bizarre form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Ghetto youth are transferred from their decrepit, underfunded, racially segregated schools to brand-new high-tech prisons located in white rural counties.

Despite the fact that in America we incarcerate more juveniles for life terms than in any other country in the world, the truth is that the vast majority of youth offenders will one day be released. The question is simple and stark. Do we want to help them change or do we want to help them become even more violent and dangerous?

When we say, 'Look, Donald Trump was a friend to hip hop back in the day; so was Bill Clinton,' It doesn't mean that because he was a friend to hip hop back in the day, that the same Bill Clinton wasn't at the lead of this mass incarceration of African Americans today.

I'm not excusing crime or those who bring poison into the community, but I do want brothers and sisters in prison to know someone cares.

One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.

Prisons are hate factories, Pastor, and society wants more and more of them.

There is no Escape

Treatments are very limited, and deinstitutionalization has resulted in increased homelessness and incarceration for this population. In many ways, deinstitutionalization is a crime against humanity: There is no other disease in which needed inpatient care is denied for political reasons.

The lifetime likelihood of imprisonment for white women is 1 in 118; for black women, it's 1 in 19.

Since 1980, the rate of incarceration for women has risen more than 700 percent. The majority of these women are imprisoned for nonviolent offenses.

But there I was, in street clothes, walking into the California Institution for Women, knowing I'd be able to walk out. As I passed through the doors into the yard, I felt a rush of emotion. I was here with purpose, in possession of my dignity, my individuality, my own power—all the things that had been stripped from me the last time I stood in this yard.

When I left the parole building that day, it was the first time in two decades that I was no longer in the clutches of the U.S. justice system.

The number of children under age eighteen with a mother in prison has more than doubled since 1991. Approximately 10 million American children have or have had a parent in prison.

The American Bar Association documented 45,000 legal sanctions and restrictions imposed upon people with criminal records, a near-impenetrable barrier denying access to employment, student loans, housing, public assistance, custody of your children, the right to vote—in many places, the formerly incarcerated are even blocked from visiting a loved one in prison.