Malcolm Jenkins Quotes

As soon as I ended up being incarcerated, I said, you know, this is not the life for me.

I remember the people I knew in prison; I was very fortunate to know them - they came from 1910, 1920, 1930.

Prisons are out of public sight, and most often out of mind. But the vast majority of prisoners will at some point leave jail and rejoin our communities, which is why what happens inside matters to us all.

We've been addicted to incarceration as a primary response for decades, whether or not it's a good use of resources, whether or not it's humane, whether or not it is effective at keeping us safe, rehabilitating or healing victims.

One of the things I love about 'Orange' is I think we bring to light a lot of topics that, particularly in terms of prison, might go untalked about.

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

The second time I went to jail, I was like, 'Okay, this is not the move.'

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

[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.

A lot of the best of what's come from working on 'Orange Is the New Black' is working with the Women's Prison Association and kind of getting to see firsthand what they do for incarcerated women.

The whole issue of corrections is something that came up a lot, no matter where we were. I think people would expect that would be a Milwaukee issue, but it's an issue across the state, and that ties to so many other things.

I've said many of my friends are in jail; some already died.

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.

The fact that more than 50 percent of Americans have an immediate family member either currently or formerly incarcerated tells you a lot about just how defining a feature of American culture incarceration has become.

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

Unfortunately, the elimination of incentives such as parole, good time credits and funding for college courses, means that fewer inmates participate in and excel in literacy, education, treatment and other development programs.

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

The subject of criminal rehabilitation was debated recently in City Hall. It's an appropriate place for this kind of discussion because the city has always employed so many ex-cons and future cons.

We the people say it loud and clear every Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as peaceful stretches - More of our population needs to be behind bars.

We need prisons because there are some hardcore criminals, but I never met a guy who has been in jail that came out with a smile on his face thinking, 'Right, that's it - now I am going to be good!'

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

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 spend $94,000 per prisoner [per year]. There is a tension between punishment and making people’s lives better and I don’t actually think that we have done the second part well. We put people in prison and expect them to come out

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.