Quotes About Criminalization

The criminalization of file sharing is pathetic. It's so pathetic, it's almost funny. Imagine if the radio people would have lobbied for a federal law enforcement agency to raid all homes for illegal transmissions of moving picture experiments in order to stop the invention of television. It's ludicrous.

The War on Drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws.

Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

We're willing to spend countless dollars putting people who need help in cages, and then when they get out we say you can't have a job, and you can't have housing, and because you don't have either, we're going to take your kids, too.

Would the world be a better place if all drugs were legalized tomorrow? Absolutely. But pragmatically speaking, you're not going to go from the criminalization of all drugs to the legalization of drugs overnight.

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon White House "had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify

We can find any number of ways to criminalise begging, but when we do so, aren't we attacking the problem from entirely the wrong angle? Banning begging or rough sleeping treats street homelessness as a lifestyle choice that can be discouraged through threats of legal action and heavy-handed policing.

I am fed up with a system which busts the pot smoker and lets the big dope racketeer go free.

Our entire lives, we're inundated with media and messaging that tells us that to be incarcerated is to be criminal and to be criminal is to be a bad person.

The war on drugs is really the war on people who buy drugs from people who don't lobby the government.

American capitalism needs a steady supply of immigrant labor, but it needs it cheap. By criminalizing the workers, the state helps to keep them uncertain, uneasy, disorganized, and docile. The attack on immigrants, therefore, is both "[p]olitically…an organic expression of nativist hostility and a very useful, rational system of elite-inspired class control"—"the primary product" of which "is… fear.

make plus model plus race equaled drug dealer,

Suddenly, I began to wonder: If one in three or four American women had an abortion at some time in her life--a common statistical estimate, even in those days of illegality-- then why, WHY should this single surgical procedure be deemed a criminal act?

In China the underworld and officialdom have interpenetrated and become one. Criminal elements have become officialized as officials have become criminalized.

Decades of racist, dehumanizing immigration policies have created systems that have criminalized and traumatized our immigrant neighbors, friends, and families in St. Louis and across our country.

In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.

the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. Immigrants

It is no contradiction to oppose the criminalization of discrimination on the basis of race, sex, national origin, etc., while at the same time declaring that such behavior is immoral and unethical.

Once you've acquired a criminal record, you can be discriminated against legally in employment, housing, and access to education and public benefits. You're relegated to a permanent second-class status, forever a 'criminal.' Inflicting this amount of unnecessary pain and suffering is not cheap.

How did we suddenly become entranced with gangster culture? I saw it this morning on campus. When did the black community say we should all look like criminals?

I want to emphasize that at issue here is not just co-optation or privatization but a change in the discourse that incorporates the punitive with the therapeutic, with vast implications for the embeddedness of criminalization with pathologization.

School is now a place where punishment and discipline are prioritized over serving students and educating them. Any moment where a student falls outside scripted behavior becomes an opportunity for law enforcement to come in, criminalizing ordinary things people do every day.

During the debate on the CLA Act in the House of Commons, a Liberal member named Henry Labouchère had questioned why sexual acts between men should not be included in the bill. The late addition of the Labouchère Amendment made any act of "gross indecency" between men punishable by two years in prison—thus criminalizing homosexuality in Great Britain for the next seventy-two years.