Eugene Jarecki Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Private-sector firms are increasingly active in the prison industry and they and the militantly unionized correctional officers, almost all unskilled labor, constantly lead public demands for more criminal statutes and more draconian penalties.

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.

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.

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

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.

If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.

How come we never use prison, the failure of prison, as a reason not to give more prison? There's never a moment where we say, 'OK, well, prison hasn't worked, so we're not going to try that again.'

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

We think it's OK for us to have the world's largest prison population and for one racial group to be overrepresented therein.

The people deemed too dangerous to release therefore become the very people released with no conditions and no supervision.