Best Prison Reform Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

Source: Punching the Air

“There are hundreds of political prisoners right now in America’s jails who were so taken by Malcolm [X’s} spirit that they became warriors and the powers that be understood them as warriors. They knew that a lot of these other middle-class [black] leaders were not warriors; they were professionals; they were careerists. But these warriors had callings, and they have paid an incalculable and immeasurable price in those cells.”

Source: Black Prophetic Fire

“Every society has the criminals that it deserves.”

Justice Punishment Sociology Criminology Prison Reform

Author:Havelock Ellis

“In seeking to severely penalize criminals society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength for future atrocities glorious and otherwise.”

Humor Prison Prison Reform Correctional Facilities

Book:Big Sur

Source: Big Sur

“No one who worked in "Corrections" appeared to give any thought to the purpose of our being there, any more than a warehouse clerk would consider the meaning of a can of tomatoes, or try to help those tomatoes understand what the hell they were doing on the shelf.”

Justice System Prison Reform

Author:Piper Kerman

“I chose to forgive. I chose to stay vigilant to any signs of anger or hate in my heart. They took thiry years of my life. If I couldn't forgive, if I couldn't feel joy, that would be like giving them the rest of my life. The rest of my life is mine. Alabama took thirty years. That was enough.”

Inspiration Forgiveness Prison Reform

Book:The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

Source: The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

“Don't promote yourself as a country of constitutionality and compassion if you honestly believe that putting people in prison and treating them like animals is justified. Stop all the hype that we live in a free and democratic society. I used to ramble on about the same stuff. But now—are we really a country that believes in fairness and compassion? Are we really a country that treats people fairly? I've met good men—yes, good men—in prison who made mistakes out of stupidity or ignorance, greed, or just bad judgment, but they did not need to be sent to prison to be punished; eighteen months for catching too many fish; two years for inflating income on a mortgage application; three months for selling a whale's tooth on eBay; fifteen years for a first-time nonviolent drug conspiracy in which no drugs were found or seized. There are thousands of people like these in our prisons today, costing American taxpayers billions of dollars when these individuals could be punished in smarter, alternative ways. Our courts are overpunishing decent people who make mistakes, and our prisons have no rewards or incentives for good behavior. In this alone criminal justice and prison systems contradict their own mission statements (244).”

Prison Jail Corrections Prison Reform

Author:Bernard B. Kerik

“People ask me how I can stay in Alabama. Why wouldn't I leave? Alabama is my home. I love Alabama--the hot days in summer and the thunderstorms in winter. I love the smell of the air and the green of the woods. Alabama has always been God's country to me, and it always will be. I love Alabama, but I don't love the State of Alabama. Since my release, not one prosecutor, or state attorney general, or anyone having anything to do with my conviction has apologized. I doubt they ever will. I forgive them...I made a choice...I chose to forgive.”

Inspiration Racism Forgiveness Prison Reform

Book:The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

Source: The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

“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 Justice Prison Human Rights Mass Incarceration Criminal Justice Reform Prison Reform

Book:I Have Waited for You: Letters from Prison

Source: I Have Waited for You: Letters from Prison

“It is not the prisoners that need reformation. It is the prisons.”

Prison Reform

Author:Oscar Wilde

“In Waquant's words: "Racial division was a consequence, not a precondition of slavery, but once it was instituted it became detached from its initial function and acquired a social potency all its own." After the death of slavery, the idea of race lived on/”

Race Racism Social Justice White Supremacy Prison Reform Prison Industrial Complex

Book:The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Source: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“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 Incarceration Prisons Criminal Justice Reform Prison Reform Decarceration

Book:For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State

Source: For the Children?: Protecting Innocence in a Carceral State

“In every scenario analyzed by every economist ever, prevention is the most affordable option. Rehabilitation is a distant second. Staying the same is the least sustainable and most expensive plan. Prisoners don't even pay taxes. They are the definition of a financial drain on society. But they weren't born that way. We created them.”

Prison Reform End Mass Incarceration

Book:Lady Garland Tames her Dragons and Brings Peace to the Kingdom

Source: Lady Garland Tames her Dragons and Brings Peace to the Kingdom

“It was official. At eleven years old, I'd been arrested, charged, and placed in the custody of the Fairfax County Police Department. This is how it all began.”

Prison Reform

Book:82189: Confessions of a Prison Bitch

Source: 82189: Confessions of a Prison Bitch

“Today, the growing social movement contesting the supremacy of global capital is a movement that directly challenges the rule of the planet—its human, animal, and plant populations, as well as its natural resources—by corporations that are primarily interested in the increased production and circulation of ever more profitable commodities. This is a challenge to the supremacy of the commodity form, a rising resistance to the contemporary tendency to commodify every aspect of planetary existence. The question we might consider is whether this new resistance to capitalist globalization should also incorporate resistance to the prison.”

Capitalism Abolition Prison Reform Abolition Of Prison

Book:Are Prisons Obsolete?

Source: Are Prisons Obsolete?

“Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.”

Men May Moving Poetry Social Effort Produce Poet Needed Prison Reform Prose Nerves Peers Melodrama Faust Prison Reform

Author:George Bernard Shaw

“President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen.”

Firsts Said President Chance Sitting Prison Yesterday Former Reform President Obama Congressman Good Chance Prison Reform

Author:Jimmy Fallon

“I feel like it had an impact, in that it started the attention that has been paid to what was happening. It started to get us into this whole conversation about prison reform, the whole bipartisan dialogue that's been happening over the past five, six years about this, where you have a Van Jones and a Newt Gingrich, and you have the Rick Perrys and so forth getting up and talking about the need to reform.”

Needs Feels Years Has Beens Whole Past Attention Talking Five Conversation Six Happenings Paid Impact Prison Dialogue Reform Vans Over The Past Bipartisan Newts Prison Reform

Author:Ava DuVernay

“There are so many issues that impact women. When we talk about prison reform, for example, women were [once] sterilized in women's prisons. When they were giving birth, they were asked to sign paperwork but they weren't even completely conscious of what they were signing. That sounds like something that would never happen in America, but it was happening, not just in America, but in [California], one of the most progressive states in the United States.”

“The issues which mattered to me as an activist, mainly things like prison reform and AIDS, have less of a chance of getting covered on my show than things I don't have a personal interest in. It's because I don't trust my antenna about being a good storyteller on those subjects, because I know a lot and therefore lose touch with what the average person might find interesting about them.”

“I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”