Pat Robertson Quotes

America, the self-described greatest nation on Earth, has the highest incarceration rate on the planet.

Today, 15 years after crime peaked, the American prison system has become a leviathan unmatched in human history. Never has a supposedly ‘free country’ denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens…. We have become a nation of jailers.

The United States makes up 5 percent of the world’s population yet has 25% of its prison population.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

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

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

No penal or political system which multiplies the population of the prisons at the rate of 10 per cent every year will solve a problem which is growing to be more and more of a danger to the social and moral life of the nation.

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

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

[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.

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.

If people are being upstanding citizens of the Republic, then you have to widen the net to incarcerate them. This explains why America's prisons are full of nonviolent offenders - a perfect example of American exceptionalism.

If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.

The federal prison population increased by almost 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, often at a far faster rate than the Bureau of Prisons could accommodate in their own facilities.

The mass incarceration going on in this country and with my people is crazy.

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.

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.

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.

Mandatory prison terms is easy to say, but where are we going to put people?