Top 201 Incarceration Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages - en masse.

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.

We must build a movement for education, not incarceration. A movement for jobs, not jails. A movement that will end all forms of discrimination against people released from prison - discrimination that denies them basic human rights to work, shelter and food.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

Now that private prison companies have found that they can make a killing on mass incarceration, these private prison companies are now in the business of building detention centers for suspected illegal immigrants.

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.

Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.

The US and Europe are committing suicide in different ways. In Europe it's austerity in the midst of recession and that's guaranteed to be a disaster. There's some resistance to that now. In the US, it's essentially off-shoring production and financialization and getting rid of superfluous population through incarceration.

States began to realize how much money they were spending on incarceration and how much money they were spending fighting this ludicrous war on drugs that was actually counterproductive.

For children, the era of mass incarceration has meant a tremendous amount of family separation, broken homes, poverty, and a far, far greater level of hopelessness as they see so many of their loved ones cycling in and out of prison. Children who have incarcerated parents are far more likely themselves to be incarcerated.

For those of you that don't know, the reason I named my album 'Free TC' is because my lil' brother is named TC. He's locked up for something that he didn't do, and what I'm trying to do is just raise awareness around the whole mass incarceration thing going on in our country, especially with our people.

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.

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).

I support defunding the police - particularly the militarization of our police force and reallocating those resources toward public health. And not just health care but mental health support, affordable housing, education, alternatives to incarceration, non-emergency responses to those who might be in mental distress.

These 2.3 million prisoners, somehow we've convinced ourselves that's normal and rational, more prisoners than soldiers, more prisoners than China, more than one per cent of the adult population, seven times the incarceration rate of Canada or any Western European country.

The great gift of 'Incarceration Nations' is that, by introducing a wide range of approaches to crime, punishment, and questions of justice in diverse countries - Rwanda, South Africa, Brazil, Jamaica, Uganda, Singapore, Australia and Norway - it forces us to face the reality that American-style punishment has been chosen.

I actually believe that some residue of discrimination would lessen, because it's my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don't inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you.

A lot of the problems we have in our criminal-justice system, you know, the problem of over-incarceration, the problem of prosecutorial abuse, the problem of just this sort of mass crop of people, of plea bargains, they all have to do with the system being overloaded. If crime was lower, many of the problems would go away.

We forget the conditions - not only in slavery - but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today's incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things. We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.

In the United States, rising esteem for the military in uniform corresponds to the growing militarization of the society as a whole. All of this despite repeated revelations of the illegality and immorality of the military's own incarceration systems, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, whose systematic practices border on if not actually constitute torture.

Mass incarceration is a policy that's kind of built up over the last four decades and it's destroyed families and communities, and something we need to change. And it's fallen disproportionally on black and brown communities, especially black communities, and it's kind of a manifestation of structural racism.

If we can make sure that that young boys starting at the age of three or four already knows their colors and their letters and are getting good preschool, and by the time they get into school they've got a good teacher and are getting the support that they need and are able to keep up with their classwork, that is going to do more to reduce the incarceration rate at the same time, obviously, as it increases the college enrollment rate.

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.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

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.

The school-to-prison pipeline - the disproportionality that exists in handing out school discipline in schools to Black and Brown students for simple infractions - pushes kids out of classrooms and into our ever-growing system of mass incarceration.

The prison industrial complex, to put it in its crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there's what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It's hard to shut off because politicians rely upon the steady flow of jobs to their district that the prison system and its related industries promise.

The greatest stain upon this great Australian nation's character, without any question, is the great gaps that exist between our Aboriginal brothers and sisters in terms of their health, their education, their living conditions, their incarceration rates and life expectancy. It's a great stain.

Dick Gregory used every syllable, every metaphor, every joke, every march, every incarceration, every hour of his life, to embarrass this country into providing a more perfect, perfect union.

In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.

I'm a part of major league rugby. We had a league meeting to decide what to do with anthem protests, and even though I personally agree with what they say they are protesting as inequality and judicial system and incarceration rates among minorities, we decided all should stand and respect every national anthem.

The U.S. generally wants to solve problems with coercion. That's kind of the default way the American state wants to try to solve problems. So there are many parallels between that: mass incarceration, mass surveillance, and militarism.

You have to know the forces that are against you and that are trying to break you down. We talk about the problems facing the black community: the decimation of the black family; the mass incarceration of the black man; we're talking about the brutality against black people from the police. The educational system.

Incarceration and recidivism rates high? Providing people an incentive to stay out of jail while also providing them some level of economic security while they get back on their feet - both accomplished by a UBI - sounds like a great way to solve that problem.

I think the biggest problem in our country is mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex. From the Rockefeller drug laws to stand your ground to stop and frisk, all these are pointing people, especially and disproportionately black and brown people, towards the criminal-justice system. It's depleting whole generations of people.

I think it's critically important for people to understand that this system of mass incarceration governs not just those who find themselves in prison on any given day, but also all those who are in jail, on probation or parole, as well as all those who are just months away from being locked up again because they are unable to find work or housing due to their criminal record.

We long to have a home where civil freedoms are respected, where our children will not be subject to mass surveillance, abuse of human rights, political censorship and mass incarceration. We stand with all the free peoples of the world and hope you stand with us in our quest for justice and freedom.

Conservatives will fight hard to preserve the institutions of mass incarceration and police brutality. Because they don't see themselves as victims of these things, but as benefactors, they will fight hard to preserve the status quo against a reform candidate.

The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system's most dramatic expansion.

Exposing police lying is difficult largely because it is rare for the police to admit their own lies or to acknowledge the lies of other officers. This reluctance derives partly from the code of silence that governs police practice and from the ways in which the system of mass incarceration is structured to reward dishonesty.

I think so much of my life had me growing up under extreme poverty and really challenging conditions, with having the police in my neighborhood and seeing the impact of over-incarceration. Having a father love up on me and remind of who I was, and my strength against those conditions, really shaped why I'm an organizer today.

Dunbar-Ortiz strips us of our forged innocence, shocks us into new awareness, and draws a straight line from the sins of our fathers-settler-colonialism, the doctrine of discovery, the myth of manifest destiny, white supremacy, theft and systematic killing-to the contemporary condition of permanent war, invasion and occupation, mass incarceration, and the constant use and threat of state violence.

In other words, in the same way that mass incarceration surged because of a real thing, it's finally starting to ebb because of a real thing: the actual, concrete decline in violent crime that started in the early 90s and which appears to be permanent. America is simply a safer place than it used to be, and looks set to stay that way.

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 really think we were charting a course to having a more sane response to mass incarceration, to drug use, and to understanding that the war on drugs has resulted only in the empowerment of vast criminal enterprises and the destruction of democracies around the world. And all that is coming to a miserable, horrific halt.

All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.

Middle-class white children, children of privilege, are afforded the opportunity to make a lot of mistakes and still go on to college, still dream big dreams. But for kids who are born in the ghetto in the era of mass incarceration, the system is designed in such a way that it traps them, often for life.

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.

Any revolutionary agitation exacts enormous sacrifices, not so much in terms of prison sentences and years of incarceration - which have been raining down by the hundreds of years annually - as in terms of the manifold personal sacrifices sustained by those who commit themselves to revolutionary agitation.

The legalization of drugs, a proliferation of a public health approach to drug use and drug addition, a compassionate mental health system. And can we just say gender equality and the end of mass incarceration and the final shedding of the vestiges of a slave-based nation? Can we have that, too? Can I have it all?

So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.

Job insecurity, debt servitude, poverty, incarceration and a growing network of real and symbolic violence have entrapped too many young people in a future that portends zero opportunities and zero hopes. This is a generation that has become the new register for disposability, redundancy, and new levels of surveillance and control.

The United States does have the highest rate of incarceration in the world dwarfing the rates of even highly repressive regimes like Russia, China or Iran. This reflects a radical shift in criminal justice policy, a stunning development that virtually no one - not even the best criminologists - predicted forty years ago.

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.

But for poor black people and working-class black people, it is a much more difficult way to go. The over-incarceration of black people is just intolerable. When you look at the disparity in terms of education and access to fair schooling, it is horrible. If this would happen to white people in this country, it would not be tolerated.

The success of the few does not excuse the caste-like system that exists for many. In fact, black exceptionalism - the high-profile, highly visible examples of the black success - actually serves to justify and rationalize mass incarceration.

As a society, we're failing. In so many ways. Such high incarceration rates of underrepresented minorities ultimately means we're missing out on great potential from black and Latino communities. Yes, there's immense talent brewing even within the most impoverished neighborhoods. Talent is universal, but opportunity is not.

A New Way of Life is a safe house that women can come to after they're released from prison in South Los Angeles. It's a place for women to detox the trauma, the torture of incarceration, be welcomed and embraced and live and begin their new path to - if it's recovery or receiving mental health services, go back to school, get their children back.

Order rooted in and maintained and restored by fear, intimidation, brutality and incarceration is immoral and untenable. Justice is order's intended soul mate. But serving justice is twice as hard as serving fear.

The system functioned relatively automatically, and the prevailing system of racial meanings, identities, and ideologies already seemed natural. 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.