Hill Harper Quotes

I get a lot of calls from families and people who have served time and they say, 'Thank you, Sheriff. I hate the tents.' That's music to my ears.

I know people who've gone to jail. It don't mean you stop loving them! They deservin' love just as much in there, and maybe they needin' it more.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes…. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

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.

My perception has changed from thinking if someone's in jail they're supposed to be, to there's a lot of factors that's not that simple.

Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

Prison opened my eyes to so many things. It was a great time. I met interesting people. I got to understand the behaviour of the police and the media. I am an observer of the human race.

The need to be cared for is the base of everything. In the penitentiaries, you won't hear gangbangers and criminals say, 'No, I don't want to be cared for by nobody.' When you care about them, they'll open up to you.

My family never missed a visit in eight months, ever. I cried coming out. I didn't cry coming in. There's a big difference. I believe that God put me there for a reason, Incarceration is serious.

I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

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

We're recycling very dangerous criminals over and over again.

Bad people should be incarcerated.

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

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

A judge who cannot punish, associates himself in the end with the criminal.

The United States imprisons many non-violent offenders who could instead be required to pay fines, perform community service, and make restitution to their victims… Maintaining our vast network of prisons consumes resources that could be better spent on education and other crime prevention efforts... Rather than reforming offenders, prison too often degrades and dehumanizes prisoners, making the task of rehabilitation and reentry into society even more difficult.

[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.

Almost one in three Americans has had some contact with the criminal justice system. When you reach that saturation point, people begin to understand, in a very visceral way, the difficulties of reentry.

When a young person is sent 'up the river,' we need to remember that all rivers can change course.

I went to prison; therefore, I've been rehabilitated, and now I want to get on with my life. I have paid for what I did, end of story.

We don't live in a world where, if you commit a crime, your life's over. We as a society believe in rehabilitation. We believe in second and third chances.

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.

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.

I know someone from growing up who is in jail right now for the rest of his life, but he was one of the sweetest people I ever knew.