George Bernard Shaw Quotes

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

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

the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills

Prisons are hate factories, Pastor, and society wants more and more of them.

At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.

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

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

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

We make no apology for people who should be in prison being in prison.

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

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.

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.

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

I'd rather lock somebody up and throw away the key and put them in hard labor, the ultimate penalty that the law will allow, but I'm opposed to the death penalty

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.

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

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.

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 prefer a prison full of criminals than a graveyard full of innocent people.

Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime.