Susan Burton Quotes

We spend $94,000 per prisoner [per year]. There is a tension between punishment and making people’s lives better and I don’t actually think that we have done the second part well. We put people in prison and expect them to come out

The way to reform has always led through prison.

Incarceration is supposed to keep the community safe from your behavior.

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

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

We've got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians.

I think of my brother just out of prison again. He will have spent ten years of the last 30 in prison.

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

As soon as I ended up being incarcerated, I said, you know, this is not the life for me.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

People in general have a preconceived idea of what prison is, from seeing documentaries or whatever.

Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

Yeah, I've gotten a few letters from prison.

I don't believe in killing people. I believe in locking you up for the rest of your life.

I get a lot of calls from families and people who have served time and they say, 'Thank you, Sheriff. I hate the tents.' That's music to my ears.

The second time I went to jail, I was like, 'Okay, this is not the move.'

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.

As a prosecutor, I've been in prisons. I've had the opportunity to see what they're like in America.

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

Why would anyone expect Tyson to come out smarter? He went to prison for four years, not Princeton.

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

I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

If it wasn't for prison, I was in a bad way.