Susan Burton Quotes

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.

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

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?

For the offenders completing these short sentences whose lives are destabilised, and for society which incurs a heavy financial and social cost, prison simply isn't working.

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.

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

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

Prison opened my eyes to so many things. It was a great time. I met interesting people. I got to understand the behaviour of the police and the media. I am an observer of the human race.

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?

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

No penal or political system which multiplies the population of the prisons at the rate of 10 per cent every year will solve a problem which is growing to be more and more of a danger to the social and moral life of the nation.

[We have to make] a distinction between dangerous violent criminals and people who are engaged in non-violent criminal activities….Your taking somebody out of the economy, breaking up their families, and putting them in a place with hardened criminals. I think that it is pretty hard to argue that has been a positive long-term result.

Our prisons are full of people who are illiterate and innumerate, have been failed by the care system, and often have had a parent in prison.

Almost one in three Americans has had some contact with the criminal justice system. When you reach that saturation point, people begin to understand, in a very visceral way, the difficulties of reentry.

I want to look at the community I came from and what role incarceration has played there.

By incarcerating someone who is homeless or addicted or who suffers from mental health challenges, we only further destabilize that person and create situations where they are more likely to commit crimes in the future.

My biggest fear growing up was that I would end up in prison. That was the fate of growing numbers of my peers.

This is not rocket science. If you mentor and support people when they leave prison they're less likely to reoffend.

It has to be about more than punishment. We need to rehabilitate people. We lock up far too many people in America today. We lock them up as if locking them up is gonna solve the problem. And locking them up does not solve the problem. Did locking me up make me better? No, it did not. It made my struggle harder.

We've been addicted to incarceration as a primary response for decades, whether or not it's a good use of resources, whether or not it's humane, whether or not it is effective at keeping us safe, rehabilitating or healing victims.

I would make the case that the vast majority of prisoners leave prison and go back into society. We share that society with them and what sort of people do we want them to be.

Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.

Fundamentally, as human beings, we're very, very alike and a lot more alike than we think, but we have a tendency to divide the world into them and us. In prison, when people commit a crime and we put them away, they definitely become "them." We don't want to deal with it because they have chosen to step out of society, so we're going to keep them out. Even if they serve their time, we're going to make sure that, for the rest of their lives, they're going to be branded. I don't know how to do it in a different way, but I think it clearly doesn't work.

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

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.