The Notorious B.I.G. Quotes

As soon as I ended up being incarcerated, I said, you know, this is not the life for me.

After six prison commitments, at the end of those, I was more broken than when I went into the system.

Offenders who commit crime in prison have a disruptive and often devastating impact on the prospects of those who are trying to turn their lives around and who see prison as a pivotal turning point in their lives.

It has to be about more than punishment. We need to rehabilitate people. We lock up far too many people in America today. We lock them up as if locking them up is gonna solve the problem. And locking them up does not solve the problem. Did locking me up make me better? No, it did not. It made my struggle harder.

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

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.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

Sixty per cent of people entering prison today are illiterate.

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

Once you have a felony conviction on your record, one of the most difficult things to do is to break the cycle of recidivism.

I am proud of being in a U.S. federal prison and surviving it.

I'm eternally grateful to the penal system in California for saving my life.

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

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

We're recycling very dangerous criminals over and over again.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

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.

[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.

What are we going to do to make sure people get the skills they need if they are incarcerated so that when they are released to hit the ground running? And what are we all going to do to give people who've earned a second chance, a second chance?

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.

Incarcerating non-violent offenders in the same population as more dangerous criminals has the effect of inculcating the former into a culture of criminality common among the latter, making them more of a risk to public safety upon release than when they originally went in.

I don't even think jail helps Gucci Mane. It clearly doesn't.

I've never been incarcerated; I don't deal with these things on a day-to-day basis in my own personal life, but I have family members that do. I have friends that do. I have people in the city that I live in, Philadelphia, that are dealing with this on a daily basis.