Henry Giroux Quotes

One study conducted in Washington, D.C. indicated that 3 out of 4 black men, and nearly all those living in the poorest neighborhoods could expect to find themselves behind bars at some point in their life.

The Bureau of Justice reports that one in three black male babies born this century will go to jail or prison - that is an absolutely astonishing statistic. And it ought to be terrorizing to not just to people of color, but to all of us.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.

Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. There are millions of African-Americans now cycling in and out of prisons and jails or under correctional control or saddled with criminal records. In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African-American men either are under correctional control or are branded felons, and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives.

One third of African American males are destined to be in prison sometime in their lifetime.

No other country in the world imprisons so many of its racial or ethnic minorities. The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid

People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison.

Nationwide, 1 in 3 black men can expect to serve time behind bars, but the rates are far higher in segregated and impoverished black communities.

One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole - yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).

Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control, a system in which over 50% of young African American kids are unemployed. It is estimated that a black baby born today has a one in four chance of ending up in the criminal justice system.

Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.

If I wanted to develop a scenario to destroy America, I would do what the Republicans are doing. Take the brightest and best young black men off the streets, put them in jail, make them meaner than hell for 8 or 10 years and then turn them lose in a society where there are plenty of guns for them to play with.

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

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.

We have one Black man as President; we have one million Black men in prison.

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

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 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 media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.

People are swept into the criminal justice system - particularly in poor communities of color - at very early ages... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes.

In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.

If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.

America, the self-described greatest nation on Earth, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet.