A Quote by Susan Burton

After six prison commitments, at the end of those, I was more broken than when I went into the system.

Susan Burton

Quote Topics

After Broken Commitments End More Prison Six System Than Those

Quote Author

Susan Burton
American - Activist

Instead, our system of "corrections" is about arm's-length revenge and retribution, all day and all night. Then its overseers wonder why people leave prison more broken than when they went in.

Piper Kerman

I have spent six years in prison, the last six years. Even if I was outside the prison, how much actual space was there for an investigative journalist to do his work in Iran? But I know one thing for sure: That we, the Iranian people, are much more in line of danger than the West.

Akbar Ganji

Being a figurehead for those with family members in prison is somewhat new for me. Something I've discovered since my father's incarceration is that the prison system is broken. My first-hand experiences have taught me that reform needs to happen sooner than later. I'm most interested in mentoring children with parents in prison. When a parent is sentenced to a jail term, the child is sentenced to the same time to be spent without a mother or father. No child should suffer a stigma or lack support and guidance because of the sins of a parent.

Kambri Crews

Commitments present themselves in delineations of black and white. You either honor your commitments or you don't. Success is the result of making and keeping commitments to your self and others, while all failed or unfinished goals, projects and relationships are the direct result of broken commitments. It's that simple, that profound, and that important.

Gary Ryan

... as recently as the mid-1970s, the most well-respected criminologists were predicting that the prison system would soon fade away. Prison did not deter crime significantly, many experts concluded. Those who had meaningful economic and social opportunities were unlikely to commit crimes regardless of the penalty, while those who went to prison were far more likely to commit crimes again in the future.

Michelle Alexander

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.

Michelle Alexander

I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.

Stedman Graham

The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.

Michael Moore

Our system never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.

James Forman, Jr.

Of course, our immigration system isn't broken. The enforcement of our immigration system is broken. The president Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, and several in the Republican Party are trying to break the immigration system. The system itself is not broken; it's just fine. It's just being ignored.

Rush Limbaugh

No one can say, 'I have dropped out - I am no longer in the system.' When you're in prison, you're even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don't transform the system as an absolute thing.

Huey Newton

The only victory that really counts in prison is survival. But survival means more than simply being alive. It's not just the body that must survive a jail term; the spirit and the will and the heart have to make it through as well. If any one of them is broken or destroyed, the man whose living body walks through the gate, at the end of his sentence, can't be said to have survived it. And it's for those small victories of the heart, and the spirit, and the will that we sometimes risk the body that cradles them.

Gregory David Roberts

No more than six words on a slide. Ever. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.

Seth Godin

With my resignation, I... left unfulfilled commitments I made to many comrades in the fight, commitments I hold sacred. My service did not end as I would have wished.

Stanley A. McChrystal

The prison system today is so messed up. Some people say, "Some criminals are made in prison," and it's actually true. The numbers and the facts are very clear. Almost 70% re-offend, and they re-offend, more often than not, with a worse crime than what they were put away for. And what's mind-boggling is that it's not in anyone's interests. It's a waste of enormous resources, with money, but also all of these young men and women that have their lives ruined.