Tom Cotton Quotes

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.

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

Criminal justice reformers prattle on about 'over-incarceration' in America when in fact our nation suffers from an under-incarceration problem.

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

The fact that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world's population incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners is largly due to manditory minimum sentences.

The federal prison population increased by almost 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, often at a far faster rate than the Bureau of Prisons could accommodate in their own facilities.

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

Mandatory prison terms is easy to say, but where are we going to put people?

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

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.

Just about every year, Congress passes another crime bill - spending billions of dollars to build more prisons, to place more band-aids on society's scars.

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

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

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.

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 here in America make up 5 percent of the world’s population, but we make up 25 percent of jailed prisoners. We have now over 3000 … Federal crimes.

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's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

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.

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

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

Something's going to happen that's going to make us all pay attention at the type of sentences some people are serving and the conditions in which they are served.

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.