Eugene V. Debs Quotes

Every politician should go and spend time and visit prisons and jails. Because if you are choosing to exercise this kind of power over another person's life, there's a role for that, but you have to know the kind of power you are exercising.

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

We the people say it loud and clear every Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as peaceful stretches - More of our population needs to be behind bars.

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

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

The United States makes up 5 percent of the world’s population yet has 25% of its prison population.

There is not a single man in prison today who does not claim to be an ardent patriot

No one can say, 'I have dropped out - I am no longer in the system.' When you're in prison, you're even closer to the system: you feel it more, and you might be in there for whatever reason. You don't transform the system as an absolute thing.

I have friends in prison. I send them money. I send them food. They say, 'Bro, get me out of here.' There's nothing I can do. They're five years in on a 20-year sentence. They went in at 16, they'll get out at 36. That's a lifetime.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

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

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.

I didn't spend a lot of time with prison guards, but my father was an assistant district attorney for a long time so I was always hearing stories about prisoners and prison guards.

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.

If we believe in our current penal process, then the penalties imposed by judges and juries should be the only sanctions for one's crime, not the invisible sanctions of the legislature.

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

It would be like the films I've seen where wardens would decide to be in a jail cell for a week, to get a sense of what it would be like to be a prisoner.

It is tragic that people who are incarcerated are unable to vote. They are probably the most important voices to listen to because they can tell us what we need to change.

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

The Thinking Fella Votes McKellar!

Court rules do not cause crime.

So what you do is you just reach up there and grab that lever [in the voting booth] and say, "All the way with LBJ.

Bad people should be incarcerated.

The way to reform has always led through prison.