A Quote by Ava DuVernay

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible. — © Ava DuVernay
I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.
I was wondering why I was put in prison for working in an African language when I had not been put in prison for working in English. So really, in prison I started thinking more seriously about the relation between language and power.
When I was in prison, I read an article - don't be shocked when I say I was in prison. You're still in prison. That's what America means: prison.
There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.
You can be locked away in prison and be free if your mind is not a prison. Or you can be walking around with lots of credit cards and be in a prison, the prison of your own mind, the prison of your illusions.
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.
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.'
I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.
Our system never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.
If you're doing a prison show, HBO is the absolute best place in the world to be doing that because you're not going to have to do all that, you know, 'Prison Break' stuff where you can't really behave and speak like people do in a maximum-security prison.
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.
You don't need a lot of credentials to be prison guard in a federal prison. And, you know, you give them a set of keys and a weapon, and they're in power.
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.
Prison has humbled me in a lot of ways, because when you go to prison, I became 11 R 2024 you know, I wasn't Ja Rule the superstar. I wasn't any of that. I was just a regular inmate.
To be honest, I would probably rather spend, like, a month in prison than spend a month rehearsing with some musicians, metalheads. I pick prison over that, really. And I say that knowing well what prison is like, so don't get me wrong here. Prison sucks big time.
I did almost a year in prison, a year in prison, just because my name is Foxy Brown.
When I was in prison, rap was all I had at that point because I was kicked out of school, all that education just gone and I couldn't come out of prison to play football - that was all over with.
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