John Legend Quotes

If Americans actually have the conversation about our disastrous prison policies, we'll understand the trends all move in very dangerous directions: we lock up more people, for less violent crime, at ever greater expense, breeding more dangerous criminals who often come out unemployable, violent and isiolated.

we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

Our criminal justice system has swallowed up too many people I love. I am proud to join the ACLU in the fight to make mass incarceration a thing of the past.

Our criminal justice system has swallowed up too many people I love.

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

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.

A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills

All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.

Prisons are hate factories, Pastor, and society wants more and more of them.

Mass incarceration is a policy that's kind of built up over the last four decades and it's destroyed families and communities, and something we need to change. And it's fallen disproportionally on black and brown communities, especially black communities, and it's kind of a manifestation of structural racism.

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

Mass incarceration has become normalized in the United States. Poor folks of color are shuttled from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand new, high tech prisons and then relegated to a permanent undercaste - stigmatized as undeserving of any moral care or concern.

Too many young African-American and Latino men ended up in jail for nonviolent offenses.

Justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact that since 1970, the number of people behind bars... has increased 600 percent.

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.

When I went out to shoot for the first time, I thought this was going to be about the prison industrial complex, purely about prison for profit and the ways in which there's an industry making money and profiting off punishment.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

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

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

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

Some of our system of mass incarceration really has to be traced back to the law-and-order movement that began in the 1950s, in the 1960s.

the prison system, inherently unjust and inhumane, is the ultimate expression of injustice and inhumanity in the society at large.

Because prison sentences in America tend to be long, de-incarceration lags falling crime rates by a fair amount, but eventually it does catch up.

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