Angela Davis Quotes

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

The prison is the state writ small.

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.

The problem with Georgia prisons was the poor quality of the inmates.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

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.

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.

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.

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

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

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.

Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.

Capitalism needs and must have the prison to protect itself from the criminals it has created.

People in general have a preconceived idea of what prison is, from seeing documentaries or whatever.

Everything I did in the jails - chain gangs, everything - I haven't changed the policy. I did it, I stand by it, and I'm not going to change.

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

As a prosecutor, I've been in prisons. I've had the opportunity to see what they're like in America.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

When you're in prison, the progress of the outside world doesn't necessarily translate inside prison walls. You don't have any rights; it just doesn't progress along the same timeline.

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.

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

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.