Jim Brown Quotes

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

I have never seen any good resulting from educating the Negro.

One of the problems in America is that everybody focuses on their own narrow little bit of the problem without connecting punishment and prevention together, without connecting the schools and the police together, without connecting the pediatricians and the social workers together.

We need to do a better job identifying what's contributing to the crime and making sure we hold people accountable in a way that addresses that root cause.

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

Sometimes I do feel hopeless when I look out and scream out through my music, and I scream out through these interviews, and I scream out to people to kind of get their attention back on the things that are meaningful. There's people dying on the streets of Chicago - young people, young men and women who are losing their lives.

Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout.

In the housing projects, people talked of ways to reduce crime, relieve overcrowding, and they were good ideas that we plan to study, and possibly implement.

Organizations like the ACLU fought and won the good fight back in the 1960's, but it's clear that nowadays they've run out of useful things to do since they now spend most of their time defending the scum of the Earth from getting what they rightly deserve.

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

The prison industrial complex is perhaps, at least domestically, the most striking example of us putting profit before people. It all stems from one basic misunderstanding: that the public good can be shepherded by private interests.

We can either allow our youth to shoot baskets or watch them shoot people.

The United States imprisons many non-violent offenders who could instead be required to pay fines, perform community service, and make restitution to their victims… Maintaining our vast network of prisons consumes resources that could be better spent on education and other crime prevention efforts... Rather than reforming offenders, prison too often degrades and dehumanizes prisoners, making the task of rehabilitation and reentry into society even more difficult.

I learned a lot about the law at Harvard Law School, but no one taught me about why a 20-year old black male in a tough neighborhood feels like he needs to be armed. Nobody taught me about what attracts kids to join gangs.... It is difficult to stand in judgment of other human beings without understanding human beings.

I see education in the U.K. as a civil rights struggle.

Knife crime devastates communities.

Mass incarceration is the result of small, distinct steps, each of whose significance becomes more apparent over time, and only when considered in light of later events.

Be in no doubt: we are completely committed to make sure we support young people with the additional resources that are necessary to give them the alternatives to the offer that's put forward by the terrible criminals on the streets.

Black Lives Matter is really an affirmation for our people. It's a love note for our people, but it's also a demand. We know that the system was not designed for justice for us.

We're going to build the bridge to the 21st century, we have to make our children free - free of the vise grip of guns and gangs and drugs; free to build lives of hope.

We are going to be working very hard on the inner cities having to do with education, having to do with crime. We're going to try and fix as quickly as possible.

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

If you don't educate people well, then you're going to have a lot of violent, angry young men and women. You can go around saying they're all so violent, just throw them in jail, this is an underclass, what can you do? You can create fear. The issue of violence is very suitable for a repressive society. Then you can have more legislation, more police, more laws to fight crime, when all you need to do is to encourage people in a different way.

Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it's going to building prisons and police forces.

If you ask for good schools, you aren't likely to get them. If you ask for jobs or economic investment, you won't get that either. But what we have learned, is that the one thing that poor folks of color can ask for and get are Police & Prisons.