Bill Maher Quotes

There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.

Nationwide about 1 in 7 black men are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised due to felon disenfranchisement laws.

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

For our white members, voting is something they have done for hundreds of years. But for us, it is not such a traumatic thing, because we have never participated in an election.

It's deeply rooted in the American psyche. Black men have always been viewed as the other, which leads to a different application of the laws. The current laws are an obscenity. More black men are locked up for using pot than white folk are for far more serious crimes.

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.

Wherever there's a prison, for the most part, especially where there's Black people, it's overcrowded. I don't know who really gets out.

People charged with drug offenses, though, are typically poor people of color. They are routinely charged with felonies and sent to prison.

The Bureau of Justice reports that one in three black male babies born this century will go to jail or prison - that is an absolutely astonishing statistic. And it ought to be terrorizing to not just to people of color, but to all of us.

Well, the terrible thing right now, and I don't know the statistics, but there's a growing concern in some communities about how rapidly people are sent from school to jail, how quickly they're put into the criminal justice system. And of course the rapidly growing number of brown people, both men and women, in prison. And this is terrible.

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

I admit that we are not encouraging Negro voting. The Negroes prefer that control of the government remain in the white man’s hands.

This is Selma, Alabama where there are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.

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.

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

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

In my home county—Lowndes County, Alabama--in 1964 Blacks were 80 percent of the population. Not one Black was registered to vote—Not one!!!

We incarcerate more African-American men today than were slaves in 1850.

A black man of my generation born in the late 1960s is more than twice as likely to go to prison in his lifetime then a black man of my father's generation. I was born after the Voting Rights Act, after the Civil Rights Act, after the Fair Housing Act.

A lot of black men get in desperate situations because they don't see any other avenues to make it. You make a couple of mistakes today, that's all she wrote. You're not going to get a good job; nobody's gonna hire a felon. You can't even vote. They just want to silence you.

We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.

It's the new slavery. It came out of the drug laws and it really is something we're going to have to confront, but I don't see enough people up in arms about that. We need to be.

In some cities such as Washington, DC, that 75 percent of young black men can expect to serve time in prison.

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

People talk about Jim Crow as if it's dead. Jim Crow isn't gone. It's adjusted. Look at the disproportionate sentences meted out to blacks caught up in the criminal justice system. There's a problem when people profit from putting and keeping African Americans in prison. We need to do a better job as a nation understanding the real values the country's built upon in terms of fairness, equality and equal opportunity.