Randall Robinson Quotes

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

What every American should know is that we have more people in jail today than any other country on Earth, more than China. We have some 2.2 million people in jail. What that means is that a lot of lives are being destroyed.

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

Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

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.

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.

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.

We are incarcerating more people on a per capita basis in California than any country in the world other than South Africa or the Soviet Union.

The United States does have the highest rate of incarceration in the world dwarfing the rates of even highly repressive regimes like Russia, China or Iran. This reflects a radical shift in criminal justice policy, a stunning development that virtually no one - not even the best criminologists - predicted forty years ago.

We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

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

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.

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

The United States has more women and girls in prison than any other industrialized nation on earth.

The land of the free - we've got an army marching around the world under the banner of freedom, and yet, we are the most un-free society, in terms of institutions of the deprivation of liberty, of incarceration. The incidents of incarceration is higher in the United States than elsewhere in the world.

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

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.

I think there are too many people in jail for too long and for not necessarily good reasons.

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.

We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. 'America, land of liberty and freedom?' You know, that's baloney. More than 2 million Americans are behind bars now. Communist China has four times the population and they have 1.5 million people behind bars.

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

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

The jails and prisons are the new insane asylums. That’s what we are.

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.

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