James Forman Jr. Quotes

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

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

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

We have 2.2 million people in prison. It’s a national disgrace.

Too many Americans are going to too many prisons for far too long.

Our system never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.

The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.

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.

One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.

Today, 15 years after crime peaked, the American prison system has become a leviathan unmatched in human history. Never has a supposedly ‘free country’ denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens…. We have become a nation of jailers.

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

The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.

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

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.

The whole issue of corrections is something that came up a lot, no matter where we were. I think people would expect that would be a Milwaukee issue, but it's an issue across the state, and that ties to so many other things.

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.

The fact that more than 50 percent of Americans have an immediate family member either currently or formerly incarcerated tells you a lot about just how defining a feature of American culture incarceration has become.

The United States is Fast Becoming One of the Biggest Open-Air Prisons on Earth

The prison industrial complex, to put it in its crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there's what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It's hard to shut off because politicians rely upon the steady flow of jobs to their district that the prison system and its related industries promise.

America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

We have 1.8 million Americans behind bars today at Local, State and Federal level. In the federal system, which has doubled in the last ten years, over 110,000 people behind bars in the Federal system, probably two-thirds are there for drug related reason.

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