Jonathan King Quotes

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

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.

Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

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

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.

[We have to make] a distinction between dangerous violent criminals and people who are engaged in non-violent criminal activities….Your taking somebody out of the economy, breaking up their families, and putting them in a place with hardened criminals. I think that it is pretty hard to argue that has been a positive long-term result.

Almost one in three Americans has had some contact with the criminal justice system. When you reach that saturation point, people begin to understand, in a very visceral way, the difficulties of reentry.

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 went to prison; therefore, I've been rehabilitated, and now I want to get on with my life. I have paid for what I did, end of story.

At the age of 46, in my sixth prison term, it was the second prison I was in - California Rehabilitation Center. The California Civil Education program kind of opened up all of the experiences that that I had dealt with in my life, that I had experienced.

Everyone needs a place to live. Everyone needs a place to come home to every night. I don't understand why our society, our government, can think that you can lock a person away for months or years... and then release them back after they pay their debt without any support and expect it to be okay.

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

My perception has changed from thinking if someone's in jail they're supposed to be, to there's a lot of factors that's not that simple.

Even though the Clintons started mass incarceration, which my brother is a victim of, things are going to change, though. Somebody made them do that.

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

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.

I know prisons from the inside.

I didn't spend a lot of time with prison guards, but my father was an assistant district attorney for a long time so I was always hearing stories about prisoners and prison guards.

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.

I went to Rikers one time to do 'Third Watch,' and I remember thinking, 'Wow, this is a scary place.' We were using a section of the prison where half of it was still populated by inmates.

I'm not excusing crime or those who bring poison into the community, but I do want brothers and sisters in prison to know someone cares.

The second time I went to jail, I was like, 'Okay, this is not the move.'

I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learnt some great dialogue.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.