Anthony Horowitz Quotes

We need to rethink a system that has targeted young people, particularly young people of color, for nonviolent crimes.

As politics is disconnected from its ethical and material moorings, it becomes easier to punish and imprison young people than to educate them.

The jails and prisons are the new insane asylums. That’s what we are.

Surely, we've got a way that we can tinker with this system that shuttles our children from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

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.

We think it's OK for us to have the world's largest prison population and for one racial group to be overrepresented therein.

Negro children are still sent to prison with adult criminals, and that they leave it half devil and half beast.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

If we have to build more prisons, it means we have failed.

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.

Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars?

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

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?

I've been an activist since I was a teenager. I was always curious about what we would now call social justice. I remember just trying to navigate growing up poor in an overpoliced environment with a single mother and a father who was in and out of prison.

For those of you that don't know, the reason I named my album 'Free TC' is because my lil' brother is named TC. He's locked up for something that he didn't do, and what I'm trying to do is just raise awareness around the whole mass incarceration thing going on in our country, especially with our people.

Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

You shouldn't have a profit motivation to fill prison cells with young Americans.

Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing "God Bless America." No, no, no, God d*mn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God d*mn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God d*mn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.

The social rights of children must be recognized so that a world suited to their needs may be constructed for them. The greatest crime that society commits is that of wasting the money which it should use for children on things that will destroy them and society itself as well.

Many offenders are tracked for prison at early ages, labeled as criminals in their teen years, and then shuttled from their decrepit, underfunded inner city schools to brand-new, high-tech prisons.

The War on Drugs is a war on people, but particularly it's been a war on low-income people and a war on minorities. We know in the United States of America there is no difference in drug use between black, white and Latinos. But if you're Latino in the United States of America, you're about twice as likely to be arrested for drug use than if you're white. If you're black, you are about four times as likely to be arrested if you're African American than if you are white. This drug war has done so much to destroy, undermine, sabotage families, communities, neighborhoods, cities.

There is a tendency to dehumanize kids that commit crimes. The system is focused on punishment, not on rehabilitation. These kids are the most misunderstood and most cruelly treated.