Quotes About Incarceration

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

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

He's paid his debt to society. You can't keep a man in jail because you think he might commit a crime

I do not propose that everyone in Guantanamo or its evil twin at Bagram is innocent. I just don't believe we should incarcerate people without trial and torture them or facilitate and profit from their torture.

We have 1.8 million Americans behind bars today at Local, State and Federal level. In the federal system, which has doubled in the last ten years, over 110,000 people behind bars in the Federal system, probably two-thirds are there for drug related reason.

Something's going to happen that's going to make us all pay attention at the type of sentences some people are serving and the conditions in which they are served.

Naw, I ain't never been out the country. I been a felon for a minute, so there's all types of restrictions on my movement, where I can go.

It was just the wrong race and the wrong time. Police are shady as hell. That's why everybody is locked up.

Prison is a haunted house of mirrors. It was impossible for me to come to the truth there.

And even if what you said in the article is true, about how you "want to raise consciousness about mass incarceration"—let's say this wasn't bullshit—please explain to me what a baby doll is going to do to help anybody in here.

In Rikers, you had the Italians over here, the Spanish over here, the Blacks here, then there would be your Christians here and your Muslim brotherhood here. It's just like the outside, but in very closed quarters where you have to get along or else. The sense of claustrophobia in 'Orange is the New Black' - that's real.

Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.

We have a mass incarceration among minorities that is disproportionate to our population. It's a travesty what's going on with our mass incarceration specifically of minorities.

After spending time with police officers on ride-alongs, meeting with politicians on the state and federal level and grass roots organizations fighting for human rights, it's clear that our criminal justice system is still crippling communities of color through mass incarceration.

I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.

The difference between being in a relationship and being in prison is that in prison they let you play Softball on the weekends.

Jefferson thought schools would produce free men: we prove him right by putting dropouts in jail.

Kid like you, got money, got a family, you'll be out in a few days.

My father being incarcerated for 25 years, 26 years, so I had a rough past, but me moving to Atlanta, I just thought that changed my whole identity - my thinking.

There's an awful lot about our criminal justice system that is dysfunctional. Everyone who sets foot in a criminal courtroom will see myriad ways the system is dysfunctional.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky said that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

It's French," she said. "They designed it like a zoo—you know, keep 'em in, but give everyone a good look at 'em...

Que lo pongan a uno en libertad no quiere decir que lo liberen de la condena. Del presidio se sale; de la condena, no.