Prison Population Quotes:

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

- Bobby Scott

topic: Past, Years, Prison Population

We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.

- Grace Lee Boggs

topic: Law, Prison Population, Cities, Martial Law, Exploding

If all the Atheists & Agnostics left America, they'd lose 93% of The National Academy of Sciences & less than 1% of the prison population.

- Ricky Gervais

source: Twitter post from May 1, 2013

topic: Atheist, Prison Population, America

What defenders of the system typically fail to acknowledge is that the reason violent offenders comprise a fairly large percentage of the state prison population is because they typically receive longer sentences than non-violent offenders.

- Michelle Alexander

source: Source: www.truth-out.org

topic: Prison Population, Failing, Reason, Non Violent

Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

- Michelle Alexander

source: Source: www.truth-out.org

topic: Years, Prison Population, Jail

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.

- Michelle Alexander

source: Source: www.truth-out.org

topic: War, Prison Population, Two, Mass Incarceration, Prison System

It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

- Hillary Clinton

source: "Read: Hillary Clinton's huge new speech on criminal justice reform". Hillary Clinton's speech at Columbia University, www.vox.com. April 29, 2015.

topic: Prison Population, Needs, Eras, Mass Incarceration, Incarceration

Today the United States has the highest prison population in the world, over 2.1 million people. ... We lock people up at a rate that is seven to ten times that of any other democracy.

- Eve Ensler

source: Eve Ensler (2006). “Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World”, p.124, Villard

topic: Prison Population, People, Democracy

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

- Angela Davis

source: Angela Davis: An Autobiography ch. 1 (1974)

topic: Zoos, Jail, Population, Prison Population, Imprisonment

People like myself say, 'Fix the problem. Put him in the general [prison] population. The moral prisoners will deal with him in a way we don't have the nerve to do.'

- Stockwell Day

topic: People, Population, Nerves, Prison Population

Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars, rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals' surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction and As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages.

- Ann Coulter

source: Ann Coulter (2006). “Godless: The Church of Liberalism”, p.44, Crown Forum

topic: Running, New York, Dark, Prison Population, Dark Alleys

In his recent book, When Brute Force Fails, UCLA's Kleiman argues that new strategies for targeting repeat offenders--including reforms to make probation an effective sanction rather than a feckless joke--could cut crime and reduce prison populations simultaneously. Safer communities, in turn, might produce more hopeful and well-disciplined kids.

- David Von Drehle

topic: Book, Kids, Cutting, Feckless, Prison Population

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery. The whole future of America's black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.

- Randall Robinson

source: Interview with Amitabh Pal, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. September 26, 2005.

topic: Men, People, Justice, Modern Slavery, Prison Population

If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.

- Jonathan Franzen

topic: Spring, Real, Book, Prison Population, American Life