Prison System Quotes

• No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.

  Nelson Mandela

  Inspiring, Inspiration, Compassion

  "Long Walk to Freedom". Book by Nelson Mandela, 1995.

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• It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

  Howard Zinn

  Men, Small Numbers, Humanity

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• The prison systems in this country actually are exploitative and they are not in any way rehabilitative.

  Malcolm X

  Country, Way, Prison

  Source: nyx.uky.edu

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• The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

  Serj Tankian

  Reality, Prison, Percentages

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?

  Victor Hugo

  Ocean, Men, Sea

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Thinking, Justice, Criminals

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• Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Criminals, Three, Vengeance

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• I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

  Lee Tergesen

  Thinking, Cells, People

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• I've probably been spit on more that any person alive outside of, I would say, a member of the prison system.

  Iggy Pop

  Alive, Prison, Spit

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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, Prison Population, Two

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Prison is quite literally a ghetto in the most classic sense of the word, a place where the U.S. government now puts not only the dangerous but also the inconvenient—people who are mentally ill, people who are addicts, people who are poor and uneducated and unskilled. Meanwhile the ghetto in the outside world is a prison as well, and a much more difficult one to escape from than this correctional compound. In fact, there is basically a revolving door between our urban and rural ghettos and the formal ghetto of our prison system.

  Piper Kerman

  Ghetto, Government, Doors

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• We see the corrupt prison system, we see the corrupt police system, we see the corruption in the government, from the top on down. You know, it's built based on lies. However, the marijuana industry itself, because it was an underground industry, showed us the way we could exist on this planet.

  Tommy Chong

  Lying, Marijuana, Government

  Interview with Old Hippie, beyondchronic.com. June 30, 2016.

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• The film [Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth] opens with an Albanian blood feud and goes on to delve into, for instance, prison systems, underpaid tomato pickers, the gulf oil spill. It's all woven together in a sensuous, oblique way that's not the same as the single-message kind of documentary we're used to, with an "answer" at the end. It's more like an exploration. Sort of like what you do with Birth of a Nation.

  Margaret Atwood

  Oil, Blood, Together

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• Some of the folks we see are in for defending themselves against their abusers, or drug charges that, because of the California state prison system, they have mandatory sentencing and life in prison for three counts of simple drug possession, or whatever. I find it not only helpful but, I think, necessary in maintaining my grounding and my perspective. Because music is such an unrealistic job to have. It's a really lucky job to have, but it's also very unrealistic.

  Thao Nguyen

  Jobs, Simple, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that's chewing up.

  Randall Robinson

  African American, Salary, Unemployment

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

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• ... 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

  Meaningful, Opportunity, Experts

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• America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Country, Men, America

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• I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

  Ava DuVernay

  Prison, Horrible, Abolitionist

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I've worked in the prison system, on death row and maximum security. I did that work for six years. I've worked with some of the most difficult people in our society. Buddhism was accessible and helpful for these individuals.

  Joan Halifax

  Buddhism, Years, People

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• America should meet its obligations in the form of Social Security, Medicare, our ability to pay our military, legally binding legislation that allows unemployment compensation, the judiciary, the federal court system, the federal prison system, all those kinds of things have to be paid for.

  Bill Johnson

  Military, America, Pay

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• the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

  Jessica Mitford

  Expression, Unjust, Injustice

  Jessica Mitford (1973). “Kind and usual punishment: the prison business”, Vintage

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

  Stedman Graham

  Years, Prison, Folks

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