Bernie Sanders Quotes

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.

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

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison.

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

There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.

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 here in America make up 5 percent of the world’s population, but we make up 25 percent of jailed prisoners. We have now over 3000 … Federal crimes.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 have more people in jail than any other country in Earth, disproportionately Latino and African-American.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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