Incarceration Quotes

I believe this system of mass incarceration would have Dr. King turning in his grave. There’s no doubt in my mind that Dr. King would be doing everything in his power to build a movement to end mass incarceration in the United States; a movement for education, not incarceration.

I believe it is possible to bring an end to mass incarceration and birth a new moral consensus about how we ought to be responding to poor folks of color and a consensus in support of basic human rights for all. But it is going to take some work.

What was most important, for me, is that I could share what I experience as a young person – in particular, what impact incarceration and policing had on my life and my family’s life.

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 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.

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.

We’ve been addicted to incarceration as a primary response for decades, whether or not it’s a good use of resources, whether or not it’s humane, whether or not it is effective at keeping us safe, rehabilitating or healing victims.

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.

While mass incarceration is a national crisis, it was built locally.

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.

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?

Mass incarceration will have to be dismantled the same way it was constructed: piecemeal, incrementally and, above all, locally.

Some of our system of mass incarceration really has to be traced back to the law-and-order movement that began in the 1950s, in the 1960s.

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

The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.

There is something deeply wrong with a political culture which only wants to talk about incarceration in the aftermath of a tragedy.

Individual children are separated from their parents only when those parents cross the border illegally and are arrested. We can’t have children with parents who are in incarceration.

Unless we address those that are leaving prisons, we can’t begin to repair the damage of mass incarceration and make our communities whole and healthy once again.

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.

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.

We know that the environment and political information is important, and we expose and teach the women about some of the environmental factors that lead to their incarceration.

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.

We have a mass incarceration among minorities that is disproportionate to our population. It’s a travesty what’s going on with our mass incarceration specifically of minorities.

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.

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.

Mass incarceration is the result of small, distinct steps, each of whose significance becomes more apparent over time, and only when considered in light of later events.

Over its 40 years, Muppets on ‘Sesame Street’ have addressed AIDS, divorce, a parent’s deployment overseas, and a death in the family. But the show is addressing incarceration in a way it didn’t used to: by bringing the show directly to the kids and families it wants to reach.

When we say, ‘Look, Donald Trump was a friend to hip hop back in the day; so was Bill Clinton,’ It doesn’t mean that because he was a friend to hip hop back in the day, that the same Bill Clinton wasn’t at the lead of this mass incarceration of African Americans today.

For millions of Americans, the continued incarceration of Jose Compean and Ignacio Ramos is a grim reminder of everything that has gone wrong with border security.

As described in ‘The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,’ the cyclical rebirth of caste in America is a recurring racial nightmare.

The fact that more than 50 percent of Americans have an immediate family member either currently or formerly incarcerated tells you a lot about just how defining a feature of American culture incarceration has become.

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

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.

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.

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

The removal of people of Japanese descent from their homes and their incarceration in camps were executed with the same sort of political calculus of fear and bigotry that Mr. Trump is using to redefine American immigration policy.

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

In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.

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.

School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration.

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

As a general rule, I don’t like to see laws that allow for the arrest and incarceration of people based on a sort of subjective standard.

America, the self-described greatest nation on Earth, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet.

A neoliberal disaster is one who generates a mass incarceration regime, who deregulates banks and markets, who promotes chaos of regime change in Libya, supports military coups in Honduras, undermines some of the magnificent efforts in Haiti of working people, and so forth.