Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

When you go to prison they forget it's your Constitution, too.

I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

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

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

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

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

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

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.

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

I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.

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.

The way to reform has always led through prison.

One would think that if the State takes the extreme step of depriving a person of their liberty, then those the State employs to incarcerate must surely be directly accountable to the State. Privatizing that accountability is wrong in principle.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted; and by which, during that term, a portion of the prison employment shall be for, and the product thereof be faithfully paid over to, the support of the criminal’s family; and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

One per cent of the U.S. population are in prison. In Iran, it’s .2 per cent, and most of them are drug traffickers. Nobody is talking about prisoners in the United States. Should there be an international determination against human-rights abuses in United States prisons? Is there any interest on the part of international organizations to do this? I don’t think so.

Eddie Conway is central to my first memories. My parents used to take me to, when it was open, the Baltimore city penitentiary to see Eddie Conway - I was talking to my dad about this recently - from the time I might have been one or two years old. I mean, literally, my first memories are of black men in jail, specifically of Eddie Conway.

Every politician should go and spend time and visit prisons and jails. Because if you are choosing to exercise this kind of power over another person's life, there's a role for that, but you have to know the kind of power you are exercising.

Prisoners have benefited disproportionately from 'rights inflation' - the expansion of human rights into unforeseen nooks and crannies.

Because a woman goes to prison doesn't mean she's a bad mom - doesn't mean that she shouldn't have her children.

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.

Behind every great man in prison is another great man in prison.

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.