Overcrowded Prisons Quotes

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

We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country. It's destroying families, it's destroying communities and we're the most incarcerated country in the world, and when you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration.

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

All prisons are brimming over with innocence. It is those who cram their fellows into them, in the name of empty ideas, who are the only guilty ones.

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

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

It has to be about more than punishment. We need to rehabilitate people. We lock up far too many people in America today. We lock them up as if locking them up is gonna solve the problem. And locking them up does not solve the problem. Did locking me up make me better? No, it did not. It made my struggle harder.

The United States does have the highest rate of incarceration in the world dwarfing the rates of even highly repressive regimes like Russia, China or Iran. This reflects a radical shift in criminal justice policy, a stunning development that virtually no one - not even the best criminologists - predicted forty years ago.

For the offenders completing these short sentences whose lives are destabilised, and for society which incurs a heavy financial and social cost, prison simply isn't working.

We have let millions of people rot in jail, and let them rot to no purpose, treating them with an indifference that is little short of barbaric. We have forced people to drag themselves in chains across tens of thousands of miles in freezing conditions, infected them with syphilis, debauched them, hugely increased the criminal population, and heaped the blame for the whole thing in red-nosed prison supervisors.

The real drug "kingpin" is the user. It is the casual users who create the profits. But we can't put them all in prison; there isn't any room in the jails.

Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

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

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 war on drugs causes other supplemental crimes to take place because of the original illegality of it. But then again, that's the other reason that they're fighting it is the corporate prisons they have now. Because they've privatized all our prisons, corporations have to make money, and the only way they can make money is, I believe, the prisons have to be at least 80-90 percent full. That's why the United States - which is home of the brave, land of the free - we have more people in prison than any other country in the world.

Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people. ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.

We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.

Trying to explain the First Step Act in prison reform in a tweet or Facebook post is not easy.

As governor, I will work to reform the practice of solitary confinement, which studies and medical and psychological associations say causes negative mental health effects on children, pregnant women and people living with mental illness.

Los Angeles County Jail houses the largest psychiatric population in the country. That’s not justice. That’s emblematic of a national emergency.

I agree with President Obama and Attorney General Holder that we need to reform our criminal sentencing laws.

There's an awful lot about our criminal justice system that is dysfunctional. Everyone who sets foot in a criminal courtroom will see myriad ways the system is dysfunctional.

Prison service vans that travel 90 miles to take a prisoner 90 yards; paedophiles free to leer at children in the very parks where they have committed horrific crimes.

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

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