Michelle Alexander Quotes

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

We must do better by offenders who are sent to prison to make them less likely to return.

The prison system today is so messed up. Some people say, "Some criminals are made in prison," and it's actually true. The numbers and the facts are very clear. Almost 70% re-offend, and they re-offend, more often than not, with a worse crime than what they were put away for. And what's mind-boggling is that it's not in anyone's interests. It's a waste of enormous resources, with money, but also all of these young men and women that have their lives ruined.

Jail and the streets go hand in hand. You can't have one with out the other. They coincide.

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

We might think of prisons as miniature socialist societies, where government is in full control. For that reason, they are a complete failure for everyone but those who get the contracts to build the jails and those who work in them.… In prison, nothing takes place outside the government's purview. The people therein are wholly and completely controlled by state managers, which means that they have no value. And yet it is a place of monstrous chaos, abuse, and corruption. Is it any wonder that people coming out of prison are no better off than before they went in, and are often worse, and scarred for life?

Unfortunately, if the man who leaves the prison gates is just as likely or - as is sometimes grievously the case - more likely to offend as he was when he entered them, then we fail not only the individual but public safety as well.

People bring up Willie Horton or some other political bombshell in the past, but what they're not being intellectually honest about is if we do not work on early release, if we do not rehabilitate 95 percent of the people who go into the prison system and come out, far more innocent people are going to be harmed.

Our system never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.

The typical prisoner has numerous brushes with the law before finally being sent behind bars. Each year thousands of cautions are issued to people who will come back to crime again.

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.

Prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse.

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

About 70% of those released from prison return within a few years, and the majority of those who return in some states do so in a matter of months because the challenges associated with mere survival on the outside are so immense.

Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.

Rehabilitation is such a tiny part of prison life, and I think that has to change. The funny thing is that there's even bi-partisan agreement that it has to change, but the question is how. I don't know how.

I don't think there's been a time in American history with more innocent people in prison.

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

We will never build enough prisons to end our crime problem.

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

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.

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

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