Tony Evers Quotes

For those of you that don't know, the reason I named my album 'Free TC' is because my lil' brother is named TC. He's locked up for something that he didn't do, and what I'm trying to do is just raise awareness around the whole mass incarceration thing going on in our country, especially with our people.

Criminal justice reformers prattle on about 'over-incarceration' in America when in fact our nation suffers from an under-incarceration problem.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many of those people deserve to be in prison; however, some of them do not.

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.

Mass incarceration will have to be dismantled the same way it was constructed: piecemeal, incrementally and, above all, locally.

At least 80 percent of American prisoners are grossly over-sentenced. The Supreme Court knows this, but shows scant concern for this human side of criminal justice.

America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

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

Mandatory minimum sentences should be abolished.

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

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

[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.

Almost one in three Americans has had some contact with the criminal justice system. When you reach that saturation point, people begin to understand, in a very visceral way, the difficulties of reentry.

I believe this system of mass incarceration would have Dr. King turning in his grave. There's no doubt in my mind that Dr. King would be doing everything in his power to build a movement to end mass incarceration in the United States; a movement for education, not incarceration.

The system of mass incarceration depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control.

We need criminal justice reform. You have heard people talk about that all over the country. I was able to work on that specific issue at home.

Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars?

I think any time you're able to humanize the plight of the wrongfully incarcerated, then you're doing your job.

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

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

My perception has changed from thinking if someone's in jail they're supposed to be, to there's a lot of factors that's not that simple.

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.

We've been addicted to incarceration as a primary response for decades, whether or not it's a good use of resources, whether or not it's humane, whether or not it is effective at keeping us safe, rehabilitating or healing victims.

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.