Over-Policing Quotes

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.

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.

Mass incarceration is the result of small, distinct steps, each of whose significance becomes more apparent over time, and only when considered in light of later events.

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

Mass incarceration is a policy that's kind of built up over the last four decades and it's destroyed families and communities, and something we need to change. And it's fallen disproportionally on black and brown communities, especially black communities, and it's kind of a manifestation of structural racism.

Marijuana is not a dangerous drug. What is dangerous is the War on Drugs…. 750,000 people a year are arrested for marijuana.

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.

In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn't be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.

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.

The primary contact between Black men and the government today is the prison system.

Our criminal justice system is failing all of us. It is not keeping us safe. It is contributing to a vicious cycle of crime and punishment.

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.

The criminal justice system is not working and people want something that works.

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.

I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why.

Everybody in Detroit knows somebody who is in prison…. In Detroit, most of us are one incident from being locked up.

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

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

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 a mass incarceration among minorities that is disproportionate to our population. It's a travesty what's going on with our mass incarceration specifically of minorities.

When you have all these new police officers and resource officers coming into schools, what I'm worried is going to happen is we're going to increase the school-to-prison pipeline, which disproportionately affects students of color and lower social status.

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.

If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.

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