Trevor Paglen Quotes

So we are being systematically trained to fear this false 'rising crime' tide. This is all part of a system to lock up more people, and impose more control and surveillance.

This has been the new normal since September 11. Everyone knows, but nobody says, that if something happens again, the elite consensus in this country, and the overwhelming consensus of the citizenry, will be to pitch the Bill of Rights out the window and start rounding folks up.

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.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo—obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

Some prison officials are determined to keep the people they lock in cages as ignorant as possible about the racial, social, and political forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation on earth. Perhaps they worry the truth might actually set the captives free.

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

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

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.

In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation than Jim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages - en masse.

The crime bill basically incentivized the prison system. There were quotas, mandatory minimums. You have to serve 85 percent of your time, so it is guaranteeing that bodies will always be locked up. And that went mostly towards minority communities and poor communities, where crime is more rampant.

While mass incarceration is a national crisis, it was built locally.

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

Ever since 9/11, our intelligence agencies, as part of the 'war on terror,' have expanded their operations to include American citizens. I was 'terrorized' when I learned that the National Security Agency was intercepting information on Americans.

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

One of the things that makes me horrified about a Trump administration is the continued use of code words like 'law and order.'

Actually, the notion of what is acceptable for a moral government to do seems to have eroded in some ways since 9-11. Not to get too political here, but countries, including our own, seem to have accepted what was once almost unimaginable - condoning torture, for example, and even criminalizing peaceful protest.

When 9/11 happened, it changed things overnight, giving the biggest shock treatment to individual agency. People in the U.S., the absolute stronghold of individualism and libertarianism, had to give up many cherished freedoms and privacies in exchange for the promise of public safety.

The fact that more than 50 percent of Americans have an immediate family member either currently or formerly incarcerated tells you a lot about just how defining a feature of American culture incarceration has become.

I was always shocked in prison because it's a scary place. It's not natural to lock that many people up like that, in such a tiny place. There's something disturbing about it.

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.

The U.S. incarceration binge is not tied to crime. It's a strategy to control the surplus population in a capitalist system that is breaking down.

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.

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

The United States now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.