Quotes About Reform

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

I just think it's so outrageous that fifteen years is the kind of minimum amount of time that any wrongfully convicted person spends in prison.

Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves.

My father, David Gilbert, is in prison in New York. He is lucky that he has a single cell, not shared with another person. His cell is about eight feet by eight feet.

Prison is not meant to be comfortable. It's not meant to be somewhere anyone would ever want to go back to.

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.

It doesn't help to fight crime to put people in prison who are innocent.

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

This is not rocket science. If you mentor and support people when they leave prison they're less likely to reoffend.

We must do better by offenders who are sent to prison to make them less likely to return.

The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

You know and we have about 60 to 70 percent black men in prison today and it's because of the negativity they have in their own hearts.

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

People are calling on me to put corrupt people into prison. Where do you start?

How come we never use prison, the failure of prison, as a reason not to give more prison? There's never a moment where we say, 'OK, well, prison hasn't worked, so we're not going to try that again.'

After six prison commitments, at the end of those, I was more broken than when I went into the system.

A lot of the best of what's come from working on 'Orange Is the New Black' is working with the Women's Prison Association and kind of getting to see firsthand what they do for incarcerated women.

America should be ashamed to say they have the best justice system in the world when, every day, race plays a part in who goes to prison, who don't go to prison.

For the offenders completing these short sentences whose lives are destabilised, and for society which incurs a heavy financial and social cost, prison simply isn't working.

I have always believed prison can be very, very good for you but not by the act of deprivation of liberty alone. There has to be more to life inside than that.

The generational cycle of people returning to prison has enormous, negative impacts on all Americans, especially the family members of incarcerated people.