Ava DuVernay Quotes

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

The primary contact between Black men and the government today is the prison system.

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

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

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.

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

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

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

Our nation has slashed budgets for education, job training, economic development, and drug treatment while investing billions in prisons and militarized police. A penal system unprecedented in world history has been born. Millions have been arrested and stripped of basic civil and human rights.

Some of our system of mass incarceration really has to be traced back to the law-and-order movement that began in the 1950s, in the 1960s.

Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.

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.'

We rarely have good alternatives to offer to prison - that's our default.

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

The U.S. incarcerates more of its people than any nation in the world, or any nation in history.

The prison systems in this country actually are exploitative and they are not in any way rehabilitative.

All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.

Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people. ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

The United States does have the highest rate of incarceration in the world dwarfing the rates of even highly repressive regimes like Russia, China or Iran. This reflects a radical shift in criminal justice policy, a stunning development that virtually no one - not even the best criminologists - predicted forty years ago.

Capitalism needs and must have the prison to protect itself from the criminals it has created.

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

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.