Prison Population Quotes

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

  Bobby Scott

  Past, Years, Folds

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• Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

  Angela Davis

  Zoos, Jail, Break

  Angela Davis: An Autobiography ch. 1 (1974)

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• 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

  People, Democracy, United States

  Eve Ensler (2006). “Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World”, p.124, Villard

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• Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

  Michelle Alexander

  Years, Jail, Thirty

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• 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

  War, Two, Drug

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• 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

  People, Nerves, Way

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• 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

  Needs, Eras, Debate

  "Read: Hillary Clinton's huge new speech on criminal justice reform". Hillary Clinton's speech at Columbia University, www.vox.com. April 29, 2015.

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• 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

  Running, New York, Dark

  Ann Coulter (2006). “Godless: The Church of Liberalism”, p.44, Crown Forum

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• What defenders of the system typically fail to acknowledge is that the reason violent offenders comprise a fairly large percentage of the state prison population is because they typically receive longer sentences than non-violent offenders.

  Michelle Alexander

  Failing, Reason, Violent

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• In his recent book, When Brute Force Fails, UCLA's Kleiman argues that new strategies for targeting repeat offenders--including reforms to make probation an effective sanction rather than a feckless joke--could cut crime and reduce prison populations simultaneously. Safer communities, in turn, might produce more hopeful and well-disciplined kids.

  David Von Drehle

  Book, Kids, Cutting

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• 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

  Country, Two, People

  Interview with Amitabh Pal, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 26, 2005.

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• 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

  Atheist, America, Academy

  Twitter post from May 1, 2013

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• 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

  Spring, Real, Book

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• 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

  Law, Cities, People

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