Racial Disparities in Incarceration Quotes

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.

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

The USA has more people in prison that any other country, including countries with much larger populations. 13% of the population is black but 80% of the people in prison are black, mostly for soft crimes.

In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.

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

Our current prison state has the dual effect of getting rid of a superfluous population of basically unskilled workers (with a close race-class correlation), and also demonizing them... The drug war is basically for this - It has nothing to do with drugs, but it has plenty to do with criminalizing an unwanted population and scaring everybody else.

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.

Our criminal justice system has swallowed up too many people I love. I am proud to join the ACLU in the fight to make mass incarceration a thing of the past.

We have more people in jail than any other country in Earth, disproportionately Latino and African-American.

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.

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

Wherever there's a prison, for the most part, especially where there's Black people, it's overcrowded. I don't know who really gets out.

I think that the over-incarceration of black and brown folk is one of the great crimes of American society.

Look at the whole criminal correction game, which is a big piece of our economy. It's just an invention. Crime is being invented to put people to work.

Justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact that since 1970, the number of people behind bars... has increased 600 percent.

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.

When we have people whose lives are being turned around in a negative way because they're incarcerated for either too long or for crimes that don't need incarceration, that's a moral issue for me.

Nationwide, 1 in 3 black men can expect to serve time behind bars, but the rates are far higher in segregated and impoverished black communities.

The criminalization of Black life was something specific to the United States in the post-Reconstruction period and there's something like it happening today with mass incarceration, directed largely against black males.

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

A massive new penal system has emerged in the past few decades - a penal system unprecedented in world history. It is a system driven almost entirely by race and class.

Too many young African-American and Latino men ended up in jail for nonviolent offenses.

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

The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system's most dramatic expansion.

Mass incarceration has become normalized in the United States. Poor folks of color are shuttled from decrepit, underfunded schools to brand new, high tech prisons and then relegated to a permanent undercaste - stigmatized as undeserving of any moral care or concern.