Prison Population Quotes & Sayings

We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967. — Grace Lee Boggs

Historically, there would always be people among the general population who had family members, friends, cousins who'd done time or who'd been in prison. — Hank Azaria

The poverty argument is especially weak. In the 1950s, when segregation was legal, overt racism was rampant, and black poverty was much higher than today, black crime rates were lower and blacks comprised a smaller percentage of the prison population. And then there is the experience of other groups who endured rampant poverty, racial discrimination, and high unemployment without becoming overrepresented in the criminal justice system. — Jason L. Riley

A quick quiz. What do the following events have in common? The war in Iraq. The Exxon Valdez oil spill. The rise in America's prison population. The answer: They all contribute to our nation's gross national product, or what's now referred to as gross domestic product, or GDP, and therefore all are considered "good," at least in the dismal eyes of economists. — Eric Weiner

Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the prime reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million people, a nearly 300% increase. We now lock up one out of every hundred adults, far more than any other country. — Piper Kerman

I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population. — Cory Booker

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years. — Bobby Scott

The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes. — Harry Belafonte

If all the Atheists & Agnostics left America, they'd lose 93% of The National Academy of Sciences & less than 1% of the prison population. — Ricky Gervais

In 1982 President Ronald Reagan called for a war on drugs: by 1990 more men were in federal prisons on drug charges alone than had comprised the entire 1980 federal prison population for all crimes combined. — Laurie Garrett

Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy. — Eve Ensler

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row. — Danny Glover

I've always maintained that if I wasn't studying psychopaths in prison, I'd do so at the stock exchange," he enthused. "Without doubt, there's a greater proportion of psychopathic big hitters in the corporate world than there is in the general population. You'll find them in any organization where your position and status afford you power and control over others, and the chance of material gain. — Kevin Dutton

Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars, rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals' surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction and As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages. — Ann Coulter

Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ? — Michel Foucault

If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I'll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I'd been trying to do, was a real revelation. — Jonathan Franzen

Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population. — Bryan Stevenson

The memory was the only recording instrument of the great part of the population. Deeds and transfers were made permanent by beating young retainers so they would remember. The training of the Welsh poets was not practice but memorizing. On knowing 10,000 poems, one took a position. This has always been true. Written words have destroyed what must have been a remarkable instrument. The Pastons speak of having the messenger read the letter so that he could repeat it verbatim if it was stolen or lost. And some of these letters were complicated. If Malory were in prison, it is probably true that he didn't need books. He knew them. If I had only twelve books in my library I would know them by heart. And how many men had no memory in the fifteenth century? No - the book owned must have been supplemented by the book borrowed and thus by the book heard. The tremendous history of the Persian Wars of Herodotus was known by all Athenians and it was not read by them, it was read to them. — John Steinbeck

Convictions for drug offenses are the single most important cause of the explosion in incarceration rates in the United States. Drug offenses alone account for two-thirds of the rise in the federal inmate population and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000.1 Approximately a half-million people are in prison or jail for a drug offense today, compared to an estimated 41,100 in 1980 - an increase of 1,100 percent.2 Drug arrests have tripled since 1980. As a result, more than 31 million people have been arrested for drug offenses since the drug war began.3 To put the matter in perspective, consider this: there are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.4 — Michelle Alexander

The prison population consists of heterogeneous elements; but, taking only those who are usually described as 'the criminals' proper, and of whom we have heard so much lately from Lombroso and his followers, what struck me most as regards them was that the prisons, which are considered as preventive of anti-social deeds, are exactly the institutions for breeding them. Every one knows that absence of education, dislike of regular work, physical incapability of sustained effort, misdirected love of adventure, gambling propensities, absence of energy, an untrained will, and carelessness about the happiness of others are the causes which bring this class of people before the courts. Now I was deeply impressed during my imprisonment by the fact that it is exactly these defects of human nature
each one of them
which the prison breeds in its inmates; and it is bound to breed them because it is a prison, and will breed them so long as it exists. — Pyotr Kropotkin

Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting "prison-industrial complex" - the business interests that capitalize on prison construction - made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything - health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America's prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States. — Bryan Stevenson

The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation's capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison. — Michelle Alexander

Providing post-secondary and academic education to only 10 to 30 per cent of our prison population can translate to more than $60 billion a year added to state and national coffers. — Christopher Zoukis

All these institutions [prisons] seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population. — Leo Tolstoy

Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately 350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime rates. Yet it has been changes in our laws - particularly the dramatic increases in the length of our prison sentences - that have been responsible for the growth of our prison system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in the prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing policy changes. — Michelle Alexander

Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them ... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else. — Noam Chomsky

Barlinnie Prison stands on dark and bloody ground. It is a temple of lost souls, and a place of living nightmares. It's been the breaker of many a man's dreams for more than a century. This prison works to a model of penitence with no pretence of rehabilitation. The criminal population that society has forsaken has filled this once, seemingly, bottomless pit to overflowing with their despair and nightmares of pain. More specifically, it is the battleground of an undeclared war that still ravages to this day, between the screws and the cons. The screws, backed by their authority, would use violence, but in return the prisoners would have to resort to their cunning, beguile, and the odd sudden act of violence. — Stephen Richards

Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin's gulags. For what it's worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak. — Matt Taibbi

Al Qaeda is using our liberal justice system," he continued. I really don't know what liberal justice system he was talking about: the U.S. broke the world record for the number of people it has in prison. Its prison population is over two million, more than any other country in the world, and its rehabilitation programs are a complete failure. The United States is the "democratic" country with the most draconian punishment system; in fact, it is a good example of how draconian punishments do not help in stopping crimes. Europe is by far more just and humane, and the rehab programs there work, so the crime rate in Europe is decisively lower than the U.S. But the American proverb has it, "When the going gets rough, the rough get going." Violence naturally produces violence; the only loan you can make with a guarantee of payback is violence. It might take some time, but you will always get your loan back. — Mohamedou Ould Slahi

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison. — Randall Robinson

Most go to prison not on account of their irreducible uniqueness as people but because they are part of a marginalized sector of the population who never had a chance, who were slated for it early on. — Rachel Kushner

In Germany, Dodd had noticed, no one ever abused a dog, and as a consequence dogs were never fearful around men and were always plump and obviously well tended. "Only horses seem to be equally happy, never children or the youth," he wrote ... He called it "horse happiness" and had noticed the same phenomenon in Nuremburg and Dresden. In part, he knew this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison.
"At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and women cannot think of expecting."
He added, "One might easily wish he were a horse! — Erik Larson

Pittsburg is like Birmingham in England; at least its townspeople say so. Setting aside the streets, the shops, the houses, waggons, factories, public buildings, and population, perhaps it may be. It certainly has a great quantity of smoke hanging about it, and is famous for its iron-works. Besides the prison to which I have already referred, this town contains a pretty arsenal and other institutions. It is very beautifully situated on the Alleghany River, over which there are two bridges; and the villas of the wealthier citizens sprinkled about the high grounds in the neighbourhood, are pretty enough. We lodged at a most excellent hotel, and were admirably served. As usual it was full of boarders, was very large, and had a broad colonnade to every story of the house. — Charles Dickens

Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country. — Jonathan Franzen

It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population. — Hillary Clinton

People aren't wired to be alone. Even in the stressful population of prison, solitary confinement is still considered a cruel punishment. — Richard Paul Evans

People like myself say, 'Fix the problem. Put him in the general [prison] population. The moral prisoners will deal with him in a way we don't have the nerve to do.' — Stockwell Day