Racial Disparities in Sentencing Quotes

Our criminal justice system has swallowed up too many people I love.

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

I think the biggest problem in our country is mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex. From the Rockefeller drug laws to stand your ground to stop and frisk, all these are pointing people, especially and disproportionately black and brown people, towards the criminal-justice system. It's depleting whole generations of people.

A lot of the problems we have in our criminal-justice system, you know, the problem of over-incarceration, the problem of prosecutorial abuse, the problem of just this sort of mass crop of people, of plea bargains, they all have to do with the system being overloaded. If crime was lower, many of the problems would go away.

Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs

By reserving the penalty of death for black defendants, or for the poor, or for those convicted of killing white persons, we perpetrate the ugly legacy of slavery-teaching our children that some lives are inherently less precious than others.

Something's going to happen that's going to make us all pay attention at the type of sentences some people are serving and the conditions in which they are served.

Just about every year, Congress passes another crime bill - spending billions of dollars to build more prisons, to place more band-aids on society's scars.

If you look at sentencing in America, African-Americans and Latinos get sentenced for the same crimes at very different rates.