A Quote by John Legend
We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country. It's destroying families, it's destroying communities and we're the most incarcerated country in the world, and when you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration.
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The land of the free - we've got an army marching around the world under the banner of freedom, and yet, we are the most un-free society, in terms of institutions of the deprivation of liberty, of incarceration. The incidents of incarceration is higher in the United States than elsewhere in the world.
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.
You look at the world and see how scary it can be sometimes and still try to deal with the fear. Comedy can deal with the fear and still not paralyze you or tell you that it's going away. You say, OK, you got certain choices here, you can laugh at them and then once you've laughed at them and you have expunged the demon, now you can deal with them. That's what I do when I do my act.
We rarely know what motivates somebody in their work, and it's usually a particular moment in their life. For me, that moment is my brother's incarceration and the ways in which this country has decided to neglect, abuse, and sometimes torture people with severe mental illness, especially if they're black.
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I'm the most passionate about pushing the realization that there's the joy of love and kindness and sharing, all of these basic qualities, on people who are suffering from adulthood. By these people, I mean, I really feel bad. I think that in their sadness, they're destroying the world. The way that they're destroying the world manifests itself in all these various causes that you have banding together all over the place.
Criminal justice reformers prattle on about 'over-incarceration' in America when in fact our nation suffers from an under-incarceration problem.
[Bashar] Assad has made a series of choices ever since then that is literally destroying his country.
The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So it’s not being black; it’s a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people.
Women get scrutinized all the time for the way they look. So if I can learn to deal with that, then I do believe I can learn to deal with people's criticisms of my film choices.
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.
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.
Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction.
We're foolish if we think we're going to end mass incarceration unless we are willing to deal with the reality that huge percentages of poor people are going to remain jobless, locked out of the mainstream economy, unless and until they have a quality education that prepares them well for the new economy. There has got to be much more collaboration between the two movements and a greater appreciation for the work of the advocates in each community. It's got to be a movement that's about education, not incarceration - about jobs, not jails.
There's a problem of terrorism in the world. There's always been terrorism. There will be terrorism. You have to deal with it surgically. You have to deal with it in a serious way.
When we have people whose lives are being turned around in a negative way because they're incarcerated for either too long or for crimes that don't need incarceration, that's a moral issue for me.
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