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Criminal Justice Reform Quotes

Browse 21 quotes about Criminal Justice Reform.

Criminal Justice Reform Quotes

“For more than a half century, the Right has waged a relentless campaign against the goals and achievements of the Sixties’ movements for racial, social and economic equality. From Reagan to Trump, there has been an endless hammering away at caricatures of dopey hippies, traitorous peace protestors, bra-burning feminists, dangerous Black radicals, and commissars of political correctness.”

HistoryCrimeHuman RightsCivil RightsLos AngelesBlack Lives MatterJim CrowMass IncarcerationCriminal Justice ReformAfrican American Studies
Author:Mike Davis, John Wiener
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“He didn’t proselytize at the get-togethers,” Otis recalled. “His talks with us dealt with standing together, respecting our traditions, defending our communities, treating our women with love and care, being responsible toward our children and not taking abuse from the racists in our society.” (On Malcolm X)”

Los AngelesBlack Lives MatterJim CrowMass IncarcerationMalcolm XCriminal Justice ReformAfrican American Studies
Author:Mike Davis, John Wiener
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“Meanwhile the biggest industry in Los Angeles County was bleeding tens of thousands of entry-level semiskilled jobs. Blue-collar workers everywhere felt the tremors of the so-called Eisenhower Recession of 1958, but in Southern California the primary reason for layoffs was the advent of the Space Age. (Set the Night on Fire)”

Human RightsCivil RightsLos AngelesBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryJim CrowMass IncarcerationCriminal Justice Reform
Author:Mike Davis, John Wiener
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“There’s a reason for the mainstream bipartisan consensus around community policing: it maintains and expands the status quo. As advocates call for fewer police and less policing and criminalization, community policing becomes a way to reshape the narrative to position police as friendly beat cops who know everyone’s name. But community policing doesn’t make policing more effective, less hostile, or more accountable to the communities they serve in. Instead it allows police to further entrench their presence in neighborhoods, justify increases in their numbers, and even mobilize community members to participate in policing by surveilling our neighbors.”

NonfictionPolicingCriminal Justice Reform
Book:Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms
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“Eyes watching through filtered screens seeing every lie, reading every made-up word like a black hoodie counts as a mask like some shit I do with my fingers counts as gang signs like a few fights counts as uncontrollable rage like failing three classes counts as being dumb as fuck like everything that I am, that I've ever been counts as being guilty”

Criminal JusticeCriminal Justice SystemRacial InjusticeCriminal Justice Reform
Book:Punching the Air
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“This may sound naive, but I didn't fully imagine that little girls grow up in this country with stories like yours. And that, I am sure, you are not the only one. That little girls grow up in tents and start smoking cigarettes by age eight. So seamlessly have we (those in power) written over stories and lives like yours that, to someone like me, it is very easy not to hear about lives like yours. Not to know or imagine they exist. Not to know that public policy is failing you. Not to know that the prison system is an impoverished and wholly inadequate response to your experience and that it, too, is failing you. Which means it's failing all of us.”

Social JusticePrisonHuman RightsMass IncarcerationCriminal Justice ReformPrison Reform
Book:I Have Waited for You: Letters from Prison
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“States do not grapple with decarceration strategies & explore alternatives bc of an ethical recognition of the continuing harms of prisons or an understanding of the intertwined histories of capitalism, white supremacy, & punishment in the US, but rather bc coffers are empty, and prisons & punishment consume ever-growing portions of shrinking revenues.”

Mass IncarcerationPrisonsCriminal Justice ReformPrison ReformDecarceration
Book:For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State
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“Processed It's like I'm meat or wheat Made into a burger or deli slices Made into pasta or bread Processed Not the boy I was before the machine Before the braking down and pulling apart Before the adding and taking away I was made for easy, fast consumption Like food chains in the hood Umi said don't go there That you are what you eat Those jails that system has swallowed me whole”

Criminal JusticeCriminal Justice SystemCriminal Justice Reform
Book:Punching the Air
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“As Angela Davis has explained, if we accept uncritically the notion that prisons offer an answer, and that all we must do is improve our so-called justice systems, we evade the 'responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.' Our ultimate goal-if we truly aim to overcome our nation's habit of constructing enormous systems of racial and social control-cannot simply be to reduce the number of people behind bars. We must strive to create a nation in which caging people en masse-digitally or literally-and stripping them of basic civil and human rights for the rest of their lives is not only unnecessary but unthinkable. . . . The important question, however, is whether we want to celebrate as 'progress' any development that might reflect the morphing or evolution of the system, rather than its demise. Human rights champion Bryan Stevenson has observed that 'slavery didn't end; it evolved.' Today, we can see, in real time, the system of mass incarceration evolving before our eyes, as enormous investments are made in immigrant detention centers and digital prisons, and as growing numbers of white people become collateral damage in a war that was declared with black people in mind.”

JusticeHealingProgressCriminal Justice Reform
Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
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“All nations seem to have had supreme confidence in the deterrent power of threatened and inflicted pain. They have regarded punishment as the shortest road to reformation...nations have relied on confiscation and degradation, on maimings, whippings, brandings, and exposure to public ridicule and contempt...Curiously enough, the fact is that, no matter how severe the punishments were, the crimes increased.”

HumanitarianismCriminal JusticeCriminal Justice Reform
Author:Robert G Ingersoll
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“Is it not true that the criminal is a natural product, and that society unconsciously produces these children of vice? Can we not safely take another step, and say that the criminal is a victim, as the diseased and deformed and insane are victims? We do not think of punishing a man because he is afflicted with disease--our desire is to find a cure. We send him, not to the penitentiary, but to the hospital, to an asylum...instead of punishing, we pity. If there are diseases of the mind...as there are diseases of the body...and if these deformities produce what we call vice, why should we punish the criminal, and pity those who are physically diseased?”

HumanitarianismCriminal JusticeCriminal Justice Reform
Author:Robert G Ingersoll
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