Eugene V. Debs Quotes

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

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

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

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

The degree of civilization in a society can by judged by entering its prisons.

Prisoners have benefited disproportionately from 'rights inflation' - the expansion of human rights into unforeseen nooks and crannies.

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

Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries.

At Genoa, the word Liberty may be read over the front of the prisons and on the chains of the galley-slaves. This application of the device is good and just. It is indeed only malefactors of all estates who prevent the citizen from being free. In the country in which all such men were in the galleys, the most perfect liberty would be enjoyed.

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

No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens but its lowest ones.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

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

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

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

I'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

I don't believe in killing people. I believe in locking you up for the rest of your life.

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.

I do a number of things working on human rights issues, prison recidivism rates, and then I also push and have worked a lot on the social issues of rebuilding the family.

When you're in prison, the progress of the outside world doesn't necessarily translate inside prison walls. You don't have any rights; it just doesn't progress along the same timeline.

Prison … for the detention of persons and not for flagellating them or undermining their health.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released.

We'll get way further if we educate people and not lock them up.

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