Angela Davis Quotes

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

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

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

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

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

Most of us think prison is a place where bad people go - which is what I thought for a long time - until you really start to look inside the system and you see, this is not right.

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

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

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

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

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo—obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

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

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

In my view, the critical questions in this era of mass incarceration are: What disturbs us? What seems contrary to expectation? Who do we really care about?

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

Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people. ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.

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

Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.

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

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

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

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

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.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

As a prosecutor, I've been in prisons. I've had the opportunity to see what they're like in America.