James Forman Jr. Quotes

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

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.

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

In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.

The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.

I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.

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.

While mass incarceration is a national crisis, it was built locally.

When we have people whose lives are being turned around in a negative way because they're incarcerated for either too long or for crimes that don't need incarceration, that's a moral issue for me.

We rarely have good alternatives to offer to prison - that's our default.

Criminal justice reformers prattle on about 'over-incarceration' in America when in fact our nation suffers from an under-incarceration problem.

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

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

Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.

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

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

If we have to build more prisons, it means we have failed.

The jails and prisons are the new insane asylums. That’s what we are.

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.

I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population.

We should not have people in prisons and jails who aren't a violent threat.

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

The status quo tough-on-crime policies of the '90s and 2000s are not working and are not popular. And it provides me with hope about the possibilities for San Francisco and this whole country in terms of moving away from our dependence on prisons and jails to solve social problems.

How come we never use prison, the failure of prison, as a reason not to give more prison? There's never a moment where we say, 'OK, well, prison hasn't worked, so we're not going to try that again.'