Unjust Sentencing Quotes

I'd rather deal with Tipper than Bush. He's trying to kill everybody in jail.

It is not a court, when sentence is passed by judge-bureaucrats who are dependent upon the authorities. In the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal there are no jurors from the general public, there are only state officials, drawing their salaries from the state treasury, which is in the hands of Trotsky and other People’s Commissars. It is not a court, when the accused is not allowed to call witnesses in his defense. … This debauchery is being carried out in your name, Russian worker!

I just think it's so outrageous that fifteen years is the kind of minimum amount of time that any wrongfully convicted person spends in prison.

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

I have no respect for the prosecutors, the judges. And I say that not with malice in my heart. I say it because they took 30 years from me.

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.

No man has ever been hanged for breaking the spirit of the law.

Manditory minimums were almost always excessive, and they made me feel unethical, even dirty.

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

The prison system of the United States is an unendurable disgrace to a civilized country.

It is ridiculous to say that Sacco and Vanzetti are being railroaded to the chair. The situation is much worse than that. This is a thing done cold-bloodedly and with deliberation. But care and deliberation do not guarantee justice.

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.

I have done prison time for 13 years without any conviction.

The justice system [in Mexico] is totally inoperative…. 2 percent of all crime is someone put in jail. How bad is that?

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

I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It's not academic for me.

Transgender people frequently face bias in court and are assigned unsupportive public defenders, factors which lead to more extreme sentences and longer incarcerations.

Throughout the 1970s, '80s and '90s, federal mandatory minimum laws were implemented that forced judges to deliver sentences far lengthier than they would have if allowed to use their own discretion. The result has been decades of damage, particularly to young people.

Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.

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

We've sent 130 men to death row to be executed in this country, at least 130 that we know of, who have later have been exonerated because they were either innocent, or they were not fairly tried. That's 130 people that we've locked down on death row. And they've spent years there.

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

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.

It's true I didn't get a fair trial, but the problem is people don't understand the details. It is important to understand the details of the trial and why I'm not guilty under the charges that were brought against me.

The English prison system is altogether mediaeval and outworn. In some of its details, the system has improved since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight improvements.