Prison Population Quotes

#1. In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined.

Laurie Garrett

#2. We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.

Grace Lee Boggs

#3. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the prime reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million people, a nearly 300% increase. We now lock up one out of every hundred adults, far more than any other country.

Piper Kerman

#4. Providing post-secondary and academic education to only 10 to 30 per cent of our prison population can translate to more than $60 billion a year added to state and national coffers.

Christopher Zoukis

#5. People like myself say, 'Fix the problem. Put him in the general [prison] population. The moral prisoners will deal with him in a way we don't have the nerve to do.'

Stockwell Day

#6. It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

Hillary Clinton

#7. Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.

Eve Ensler

#8. If all the Atheists & Agnostics left America, they'd lose 93% of The National Academy of Sciences & less than 1% of the prison population.

Ricky Gervais

#9. The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison.

Randall Robinson

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

Bobby Scott

#11. I care about you as people, and I believe you are capable of great things. Each of you will contribute something to this world. You are important. You would be missed.

Cindy L. Rodriguez

#12. It's good as an artist to always remember to see things in a new, weird way.

Tim Burton

#13. I like to think of myself as a pure rebel;
A radical thinker on a musical level.

D-Nice

#14. Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population.

Bryan Stevenson

#15. Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

Danny Glover

#16. You have to say 'Men with a thinning problem'. Bald is discriminatory. I was joking around once and suggested 'gentlemen who are follically challenged'.

Haruki Murakami

#17. Don't fear tomorrow, till today's done with you.

Celia Rees

#18. I know that I received so much help from God to become that kind of person that I wanted to be. That's honestly the message that I think is in a lot of my songs.

Lindsey Stirling

#19. I want you to be happy ... to laugh, smile and rejoice in order that others may be made happy by you.

Abdu'l- Baha

#20. Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on.

Rachel Kushner

#21. People aren't wired to be alone. Even in the stressful population of prison, solitary confinement is still considered a cruel punishment.

Richard Paul Evans

#22. As we all know, there is inner beauty and outer beauty. If we examine inner beauty, to me there is nothing more beautiful than inner peace, in a man or a woman.

Alice Greczyn

#23. Should any Iraqi officer or soldier receive an order from Saddam Hussein ... don't follow that order. Because if you choose to do so, when Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried and persecuted as a war criminal.

George W. Bush

#24. The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.

Harry Belafonte

#25. Among those born into chaos, some will imagine an order and become scientists; a few will recognize the chaos and become abstract artists; most others will turn to faith for understanding; and the rest will become lost souls.

Robert Breault

#26. Authenticity is the back bone of every dream and the source of open doors.

Euginia Herlihy

#27. All these institutions [prisons] seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.

Leo Tolstoy

#28. Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?

Michel Foucault

#29. I don't like tofu. I'd sooner eat a sponge.

Sylvia Browne

#30. I voted to repeal the individual mandate in Obamacare ... I think people appreciate the fact that they know where you stand.

David Jolly

#31. Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.

Greil Marcus

#32. Historically, there would always be people among the general population who had family members, friends, cousins who'd done time or who'd been in prison.

Hank Azaria