Nelson Mandela Quotes

At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.

Something's going to happen that's going to make us all pay attention at the type of sentences some people are serving and the conditions in which they are served.

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.

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

The United States is Fast Becoming One of the Biggest Open-Air Prisons on Earth

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

At least 80 percent of American prisoners are grossly over-sentenced. The Supreme Court knows this, but shows scant concern for this human side of criminal justice.

I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.

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

One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.

In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex-convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available... in America right now.

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.

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

Dutch prisons are probably the most civilized you're going to find anywhere in the world.

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 degree of civilization in a society can by judged by entering its prisons.

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.

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

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

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.

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

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.