James Forman Jr. Quotes

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

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

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.

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

Mass incarceration is the most pressing racial justice issue of our time.

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

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.

Prisons are like the concentration camps of our time. So many go in and never come out, and primarily they're black and Latino.

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

If people are being upstanding citizens of the Republic, then you have to widen the net to incarcerate them. This explains why America's prisons are full of nonviolent offenders - a perfect example of American exceptionalism.

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

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

The prison industrial complex, to put it in its crassest term, is a system of industrial mass incarceration. So there's what you call bureaucratic thrust behind it. It's hard to shut off because politicians rely upon the steady flow of jobs to their district that the prison system and its related industries promise.

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

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

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

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.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

[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.

If we have to build more prisons, it means we have failed.

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.

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

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 very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That's why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we've merely redesigned it.

Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U.S. Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind, it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial progress than we actually are.