Chesa Boudin Quotes

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

We the people say it loud and clear every Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as peaceful stretches - More of our population needs to be behind bars.

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.

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

[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.

Criminal justice reformers prattle on about 'over-incarceration' in America when in fact our nation suffers from an under-incarceration problem.

If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.

We have 2.2 million people in prison. It’s a national disgrace.

The United States makes up 5 percent of the world’s population yet has 25% of its prison population.

If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.

While mass incarceration is a national crisis, it was built locally.

The federal prison population increased by almost 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, often at a far faster rate than the Bureau of Prisons could accommodate in their own facilities.

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

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

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.

The fact that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world's population incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners is largly due to manditory minimum sentences.

The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.

We've been addicted to incarceration as a primary response for decades, whether or not it's a good use of resources, whether or not it's humane, whether or not it is effective at keeping us safe, rehabilitating or healing victims.

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

Jail and the streets go hand in hand. You can't have one with out the other. They coincide.

The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

The prison industrial complex, to put it in its crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there's what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It's hard to shut off because politicians rely upon the steady flow of jobs to their district that the prison system and its related industries promise.

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

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.

We have 1.8 million Americans behind bars today at Local, State and Federal level. In the federal system, which has doubled in the last ten years, over 110,000 people behind bars in the Federal system, probably two-thirds are there for drug related reason.