Quotes About Incarceration

#1. Australia has a very big history of incarceration. What does that mean to us? What does it mean that we came over to a country that's not necessarily ours and filled it with white prisoners?

Yael Stone

#2. My continued incarceration has served some good purposes. My defense committee has served as a training ground for other organizers in their defense of freedom and justice.

Leonard Peltier

#3. 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

#4. If you look at it that way, then you start thinking about the basic things, which are jobs not jails, and education not incarceration.

Oren Moverman

#5. ...spells of incarceration or exile were almost badges of honour for Enlightenment writers.

Kate Berridge

#6. My family never missed a visit in eight months, ever. I cried coming out. I didn't cry coming in. There's a big difference. I believe that God put me there for a reason, Incarceration is serious.

Foxy Brown

#7. Illegal immigration costs taxpayers $45 billion a year in health care, education, and incarceration expenses.

Ric Keller

#8. Some men, under the pressure of incarceration, showed true mettle, while others revealed themselves as less than what they had appeared to be.

Nelson Mandela

#9. We have over 500,000 illegal immigrants living in Arizona. And we simply cannot sustain it. It costs us a tremendous amount of money of course in health care, in education, and then, on top of it all, in incarceration. And the federal government doesn't reimburse us on any of these things.

Jan Brewer

#10. The U.S. incarceration binge is not tied to crime. It's a strategy to control the surplus population in a capitalist system that is breaking down.

Jerry Brown

#11. Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

Bryan Stevenson

#12. A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as bycatch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets. Incarceration

Steven Pinker

#13. Monastic incarceration is castration.

Victor Hugo

#14. When you have kids that have no jobs and are not in school, too often they get themselves into trouble. So what we have got to do is invest in education and in jobs, something which I have fought for, rather than more jails and incarceration.

Bernie Sanders

#15. I live in New Orleans, because it's the strangest city in the United States. It has the highest murder rate in the country, the highest incarceration rate, and often we have to boil our drinking water, but there's nowhere else remotely like it.

Nathaniel Rich

#16. The ear doctor smiled reassuringly and spoke the lie for which doctors should be immediately jailed (time of incarceration to be doubled when the lie is told to a child): Relax, Stevie, this won't hurt.

Stephen King

#17. The answer to the drug problem is not criminalisation and incarceration, but education, regulation and treatment.

Merlyn Gabriel Miller

#18. Challenging mass incarceration requires something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do: advocacy on behalf of criminals. Even

Michelle Alexander

#19. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of nearly every developed country, even surpassing those in highly repressive regimes like Russia, China, and Iran.

Michelle Alexander

#20. I do all I can to let my students feel as normal as possible, as far from institutionalized. I see how easy it is to allow this conveyor belt of incarceration bring them from my facility to an adult detention, often for the rest of their lives.

Thomm Quackenbush

#21. You undergo your own incarceration. You may witness your demise piece by piece. You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much.

Louise Erdrich

#22. I think my whole life has been shaped by my childhood incarceration in America's concentration camps.

George Takei

#23. Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.

George Soros

#24. Drug abuse and addiction are very real problems, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should

Sam Harris

#25. The week the local paper carried a story about the boy's incarceration and lobotomy in the state hospital at Rusk, the guys at the refinery pitched the kid's daddy a party complete with balloons and noisemakers.

Mary Karr

#26. That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

Ben Kingsley

#27. There is no cost difference between incarceration and an Ivy League education; the main difference is curriculum.

Paul Hawken

#28. I wasn't shocked and I'm still not shocked. It's total exploitation, with everything up for grabs. Health care, gone. Destroy the environment in search of more profit. State-sponsored violence. Targeted incarceration. You know what's happening, though: The whole country is becoming a reservation.

Sherman Alexie

#29. We can't talk about mass incarceration at this point without talking about women.

Dream Hampton

#30. Economists have calculated that every dollar invested in high-quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payments, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better-paying jobs.37

Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

#31. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many of those people deserve to be in prison; however, some of them do not.

Rand Paul

#32. What is reflected in the way this behavior is happening - in the way that minorities are treated, and the way that the incarceration system works, and the way that even the police are treated, and the way they're paid, and the way they're trained, and the whole educational system.

Oren Moverman

#33. Hillary Clinton understands that we have to invest in education and jobs for our young people, not more jails or incarceration.

Bernie Sanders

#34. Incarceration has become a business. It is in the interest of the police and the prisons to keep locking people up.

Sam Branson

#35. Incarceration is when nobody writes a happy ending for a woman without a man.

Maggie Young

#36. The sunlight ranges over the universe, and at incarnation we step out of it into the twilight of the body, and see but dimly during the period of our incarceration; at death we step out of the prison again into the sunlight, and are nearer to the reality.

Annie Besant

#37. If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.

Matthew Desmond

#38. Incarceration didn't change me. In many ways, incarceration galvanized me. The totality of the experience helped me.

Roger Avary

#39. Today's lynching is a felony charge. Today's lynching is incarceration. Today's lynch mobs are professionals. They have a badge; they have a law degree. A felony is a modern way of saying, 'I'm going to hang you up and burn you.' Once you get that F, you're on fire.

Michelle Alexander

#40. Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs

Michelle Alexander

#41. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander

#42. The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.

Noam Chomsky

#43. Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.

Michelle Alexander

#44. Not graduating high school on time leads to fewer chances of attending college and obtaining good paying jobs, and creates instead higher chances of incarceration and unemployment.

Al Sharpton

#45. One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system - in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole - yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis)

Michelle Alexander

#46. My incarceration was actually a positive thing from the beginning. I needed a gimmick to get my act going again, it gave me material.

Tommy Chong

#47. An environment-based education movement
at all levels of education
will help students realize that school isn't supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.

Richard Louv

#48. This book argues that mass incarceration is, metaphorically, the New Jim Crow and that all those who care about social justice should fully commit themselves to dismantling this new racial caste system.

Michelle Alexander

#49. Since the end of the 1970s, something has gone profoundly wrong in America. Inequality has soared. Educational progress slowed. Incarceration rates quintupled. Family breakdown accelerated. Median household income stagnated.

Nicholas Kristof

#50. The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Barry McCaffrey

#51. We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Bryan Stevenson

#52. Mass incarceration - not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement - is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement

Michelle Alexander

#53. As a society we're always so quick and able to spend money on lawyers for someone for incarceration, but we don't make the corresponding commitment to the preventative components of it.

Matt Gonzalez

#54. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. 'America, land of liberty and freedom?' You know, that's baloney. More than 2 million Americans are behind bars now. Communist China has four times the population and they have 1.5 million people behind bars.

Gary Johnson

#55. America should be leading the world in green and clean solutions, and human rights. We shouldn't be leading the world in wars and incarceration rates and pollution. We can be a better country. I think we're going to be a better country.

Van Jones

#56. We are the in midst of a bipartisan moment as it relates to criminal justice reform and dealing with mass incarceration in America which disproportionately impacts the African-American community.

Hakeem Jeffries

#57. The Democratic leadership has expressed great concern for the incarceration rate in the commonwealth in the last few years. Now they want to fill the prisons up with people who would violate the merit law, a law that's been proven to be ambiguous at best and impossible to understand at worst.

Bill Vaughan

#58. It appears that the murder rate inside prisons is ten times higher than that outside prisons. It must be due to all those Kalashnikov rifles that are issued to prisoners upon their incarceration.

Jeff Cooper

#59. Ninety percent of those admitted to prison for drug offenses in many states were black or Latino, yet the mass incarceration of communities of color was explained in race-neutral terms, an adaptation to the needs and demands of the current political climate. The New Jim Crow was born.

Michelle Alexander

#60. We're already going down that path with illegal drug use and incarceration. I can't imagine it getting any worse.

Greg Gutfeld

#61. What I support is a whole different approach with regard to drug use, and that is spending less money on the prosecution and incarceration side and more money on prevention and education, which I know works.

Rob Portman

#62. It makes a lot more sense for us to be investing in jobs and education rather than jails and incarceration.

Bernie Sanders

#63. Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

Michelle Alexander

#64. That it is not same-gender relationships that are destroying marriage. What is actually destroying marriage is high unemployment, incarceration, a lack of education and ministers living in contradiction where they speak about holiness on one side but yet are living in adultery on the other.

Otis Moss III

#65. We have determined as a society, as a country, as a people, that the incarceration and the supervision and the specific fines for a particular crime are that person's debt to society.

Loretta Lynch

#66. Incarceration seems to have been obtained in consequence of Mrs. Packard using her reason and, not as reported, by her losing her reason.

Emily Mann

#67. The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest and some nine to ten times that of many European countries. Almost 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars.61 Some U.S. states spend as much on their prisons as they do on their universities.

Joseph E. Stiglitz

#68. My work on Orange has taught me this: Human beings are not categorically bad because of their mistakes. They can learn from their errors and get back on track. No one should be forever written off because of one part of his or her history.

Diane Guerrero

#69. Where I grew up, women's liberation was when you let a chick out of her cage for 15 minutes so she could stretch her legs.

John Rachel

#70. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.

Bryan Stevenson

#71. Crime and punishment can be summed up in two classifications: there are bad people and there are people who get into bad situations. The lines for liberation and rehabilitation should first begin with the people who get into bad situations.

Johnnie Dent Jr.

#72. As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.

Michelle Alexander

#73. If a deadly snake slithering around in a pre-school bit a child, would you box it up for a month as punishment, and then release it to prey upon the children once again?

Edward M. Wolfe

#74. I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

Paul Beatty

#75. 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

#76. Ojiugo often asked, 'But are they treating you well? Are they treating you well?' as though the treatment was what mattered, rather than the blighted reality of it all, that he was in a holding center, about to be deported. Nobody behaved normally. They were all under the spell of his misfortune.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#77. Prison is designed to break one's spirit and destroy one's resolve. To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality
all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.

Nelson Mandela

#78. Joe closed his hand over the watch and it was still warm from his father's pocket, ticking against his palm like a heart.

Dennis Lehane

#79. Is it possible that my walls are specifically erected and intentionally reinforced out of the fear that God calls me to an existence without walls? And if this is so, do I realize that I am the warden of prison that I created in which I myself am the prisoner?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

#80. I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.

Craig D. Lounsbrough