John Legend Quotes

I believe this system of mass incarceration would have Dr. King turning in his grave. There's no doubt in my mind that Dr. King would be doing everything in his power to build a movement to end mass incarceration in the United States; a movement for education, not incarceration.

We'll get way further if we educate people and not lock them up.

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

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

What does labor want? We want more schoolhouses and less jails; more books and less arsenals; more learning and less vice; more leisure and less greed; more justice and less revenge; in fact, more of the opportunities to cultivate our better natures.

Surely, we've got a way that we can tinker with this system that shuttles our children from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand-new high-tech prisons.

I am still committed to building a movement to end mass incarceration, but I will not do it with blinders on. If all we do is end mass incarceration, this movement will not have gone nearly far enough.

We are the in midst of a bipartisan moment as it relates to criminal justice reform and dealing with mass incarceration in America which disproportionately impacts the African-American community.

Did it ever occur to anyone that if you put nice libraries in public schools you wouldn't have to put them in prisons?

Politicians refuse to modernize schools, they cut out midnight basketball, but build all these new jails. First class jails, second class schools. This is zero tolerance.

Education is the single-most important civil rights issue that we face today.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

Whenever I am among my fellow Governors, I am struck by how many face the same education improvement issues.

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

It is tragic that people who are incarcerated are unable to vote. They are probably the most important voices to listen to because they can tell us what we need to change.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

We must stop the trend of closing schools and building prisons.

We need to reform our educational systems even though the Americans tell us to.

I chose to keep teachers in classrooms rather than prisoners in prison..

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

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.

For many years we have spent a great deal of effort and money on school reform. Yet where are we today?

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.