Eugene V. Debs Quotes

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.

When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.

The prison system in Norway is fairly civilized, by world standards, and so are the prisoners and the guards.

I was always shocked in prison because it's a scary place. It's not natural to lock that many people up like that, in such a tiny place. There's something disturbing about it.

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

I will say, the one thing Mexico does well is punish prisoners. They do. They're good at that.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

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.

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

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

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

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

The criminal left belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

I wonder about prisoners. They're told, "You are free, you are innocent, you can go anywhere." I'm sure they usually feel nothing. They don't burst into tears or hysterics or joy or "I told you so." It's nothing. To be on the straight path isn't a bloody thing. It's just ordinary.

We are turning our prisons into living tombs, inhabited by doomed men living in everlasting blank despair.

One of my younger homies, he went to jail, and some people came to me and were like, "Bail him out," and I said no. Why would I bail him out? He's going to prison. Let him sit and get some time served. You want to be crazy, but you don't want to go to jail. You want to shoot people, but you don't want to kill people. That's such a misleading thing.

Over the course of my career, which is about 40 years, I've visited plenty of prisons and I know what they're like.

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

Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance.

Prisons are universities of crime, maintained by the state.

Americans like to humiliate wrongdoers...We like, in short, to punish. It makes us feel good. By every conceivable metric - arrests, prosecutions, duration of sentences, conditions of imprisonment - the United States is by far the most punitive rich democracy.

If the people would but analyze the human equation of a prison they might better account for the crimes that are visited upon them in cities, towns, and hamlets, ofttimes by men who graduated with an education and equipment for just that sort of retributive service from some penal institution.

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