John Layfield Quotes

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

One third of African American males are destined to be in prison sometime in their lifetime.

Black and brown communities are significantly and disproportionately impacted by deficiencies in our criminal justice system.

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

Black people are more likely to be incarcerated than white people. That's just a fact and it's regrettable and it's got to change.

The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.

You know and we have about 60 to 70 percent black men in prison today and it's because of the negativity they have in their own hearts.

We need to rethink a system that has targeted young people, particularly young people of color, for nonviolent crimes.

I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It's not academic for me.

I am still committed to building a movement to end mass incarceration, but I will not do it with blinders on. If all we do is end mass incarceration, this movement will not have gone nearly far enough.

The U.S. prison system, over all, disproportionately affects black and brown people, but people of color are overrepresented to a greater degree in private prisons.

We should not have drug laws or a court system that disproportionately punishes the black community.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

It's more dangerous to be black in America...If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to be corrected.

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 primary contact between Black men and the government today is the prison system.

Blacks - and critically. black elites - remain skeptical of the procedural fairness of the criminal justice system, while white elites, Democrats and Republicans alike, are more willing to embrace a “law and order” approach to criminal law enforcement.

We have too many Black men in jail waiting for justice and too many Black women in church waiting for Jesus.

We have one Black man as President; we have one million Black men in prison.

Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and "disappears" people we fear or hold in contempt — with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste.

The war on drugs is a war on Americans…. We criminalize what Black people do and medicalize what white people do … The money that used to be paid to college professors now goes to prison guards.

There are poor people of color in this country whose bodies, locked in cages, enrich the prison-industrial complex.

Racialized oppression and dehumanization is woven into the very fabric of our nation — the effects of which can be seen in the lawful lynching of black and brown people by the police, and the mass incarceration of black and brown lives in the prison industrial complex,

I have spent years representing victims of racial profiling and police brutality and investigating patterns of drug law enforcement in poor communities of color - and attempting to help people who have been released from prison attempting to 're-enter' into a society that never seemed to have much use to them in the first place.

The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.