Talib Kweli Quotes

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

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.

One third of African American males are destined to be in prison sometime in their lifetime.

we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

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

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

We might think of prisons as miniature socialist societies, where government is in full control. For that reason, they are a complete failure for everyone but those who get the contracts to build the jails and those who work in them.… In prison, nothing takes place outside the government's purview. The people therein are wholly and completely controlled by state managers, which means that they have no value. And yet it is a place of monstrous chaos, abuse, and corruption. Is it any wonder that people coming out of prison are no better off than before they went in, and are often worse, and scarred for life?

The mass incarceration going on in this country and with my people is crazy.

The U.S. incarcerates more of its people than any nation in the world, or any nation in history.

Prisons are hate factories, Pastor, and society wants more and more of them.

We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country. It's destroying families, it's destroying communities and we're the most incarcerated country in the world, and when you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration.

You shouldn't have a profit motivation to fill prison cells with young Americans.

I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.

Our prisons are full of people who think they're Napoleon..or God.

Keeping them behind bars does little to reduce crime, but it does a lot to tear apart families, our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions.

A massive new penal system has emerged in the past few decades - a penal system unprecedented in world history. It is a system driven almost entirely by race and class.

I have seen the cycle of a non-violent, mentally ill offender who is arrested repeatedly and put into the system repeatedly-never being treated for his illness and, as a result, becoming more and more ill.

Most people seem to assume that this dramatic surge in imprisonment was due to a corresponding surge in crime, particularly violent crime.

The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill.

The perpetration of a crime is accompanied by illness!

the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

Classifying thoughts, feelings and behaviors as diseases is a logical and semantic error, like classifying whale as fish.

The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.

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