Criminal Justice System Quotes

“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice. (Cambridge University Press (September 29, 1989)”
― Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“You can’t prosecute criminals in a system that’s run by the same criminals.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“[T]here are some human rights that are so deep that we can't negotiate them away. I mean people do heinous, terrible things. But there are basic human rights I believe that every human being has. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations says it for me. And it says there are two basic rights that can't be negotiated that government doesn't give for good behavior and doesn't take away for bad behavior. And it's the right not to be tortured and not to be killed. Because the flip side of this is that then when you say OK we're gonna turn over -- they truly have done heinous things, so now we will turn over to the government now the right to take their life. It involves other people in doing essentially the same kind of act."

(PBS Frontline: Angel on Death Row)”
― Sister Helen Prejean

“A jury is always a more orthodox body than any defendant brought before it; for blacks it is usually a whiter group, for poor people, a more prosperous group...

Another lesson about the justice system: the way the judge charges the jury inevitably pushes them one way or the other, limits their independent judgment.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“American citizens should not lose their constitutional rights because they lack the money to pay for them.”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“There is no greater threat to a free and democratic nation than a government that fails to protect its citizen’s freedom and liberty as aggressively as it pursues justice.”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“No one should ever be wrongfully deprived of their rights to liberty and freedom without just cause, yet in the past 25 years alone thousands of people have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to tens of thousands of years in prison.”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“You can tell a lot about a country by its prisons. In hippy-dippy Socialist Sweden, rapists and murders (all three of them) while away their days making arts and crafts in what are essentially taxpayer-funded mental health clinics. The Swedes’ theory seems to be that a) anyone who commits such a crime must be crazy and b) with enough art therapy, the individual in question will soon become just another law-abiding, nude-sunbathing pot-smoker. In America, we think people in prison are either the victims of some terrible government conspiracy, the victims of “society”—whatever that means—or heinous evildoers. And if they are heinous enough, we fry them with electricity, unless of course they find Jesus first. The Swedes, in a nutshell, are tolerant and forgiving, verging on the naïve; Americans are religious and vengeful, suspicious of their government, and suckers for tear-jerking tales of redemption.”
― Maureen Klovers

“In a free and democratic society such as ours, justice should not eternally abrogate one’s rights to freedom and liberty, except in the most extreme cases.”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“Death Penalty' in rarest of rare cases, should adorn criminal justice system in India,which would operate as a detterent mechanism. Abrogation of capital punishment and it's obliteration from the law, would be a great folly. In the human rights perspective, concretising the human rights of the criminal(perpetrator of a particular offense attracting Capital punishment ) by negating Human Rights of the victim is again a murder of justice.”
― Henrietta Newton Martin

“It is quick to over punish and uninterested in rewarding good behavior. What would we say about an individual who had these characteristics? Mean? Cruel? Heartless? Mindless? Hypocritical? Stupid?”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“Police Commit The Worst Criminal Activities Than The Very People They've Locked Up. Biggest Corrupt & Racist Institution.”
― Witness

“There is a gulf between the image and reality of the punishment bureaucracy. Copaganda creates that gulf. It is the system of government and news media propaganda that promotes mass incarceration, justifies the barbarities and profits that accompany it, and distorts our sense of what threatens us and what keeps us safe.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The first job of copaganda is to narrow our conception of threat. Rather than the bigger threats to our safety caused by people with power, we narrow our conception to crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The second job of copaganda is to manufacture crises and panics about this narrow category of threats.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Copaganda leaves the public in a vague state of fear. It manufactures suspicions against poor people, immigrants, and racial minorities rather than, say, bankers, pharmaceutical executives, fraternity brothers, landlords, employers, and polluters.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The third job of copaganda is to convince the public to spend more money on the punishment bureaucracy by framing police, prosecutors, probation, parole, and prisons as effective solutions to interpersonal harm. Copaganda links safety to the things the punishment bureaucracy does, while downplaying the connection between safety and the material, structural conditions of people's lives.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Cultural copaganda is all around us--from the CIA , starting in the 1950s funding projects like the Iowa Writers' Workshop or fronting literary magazines to influence modern journalism and fiction writing, to the DEA paying Hollywood in the 1990s to insert drug war propaganda into popular television shows, to the vast array of police and military consultants who shape every fictional TV series, podcast, or movie that touches on crime. Shows like COPS and Law & Order have done a lot to distort society's understanding of what the punishment bureaucracy does.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The entire genre of police procedurals mythologizes punishment bureaucrats and the allegedly sophisticated technologies they wield. And it's not just Hollywood--fictional copaganda planned and paid for by the police and their industry allies is on TikTok and Youtube, and it's behind many community groups, online posts, neighborhood listserv emails, and charitable campaigns that seem genuine to the unassuming public.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“The concept and terminology of "mugging" as opposed to, say, "robbery" was created as part of the panic, even though there was no evidence that this ill-defined activity was increasing. This is similar to the creation of the term "carjacking" in Detroit in the early 1990s.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“On the day Chicago police murdered Laquan McDonald, a seventeen-year-old Black teenager, in 2014, Chicago cops had six full-time public relations employees. As the city fought in court to keep evidence of the child's murder secret and then later to control the uproar when a judge ordered it to release a video of the shooting, Chicago increased its police budget to pay for twenty-five full-time positions devoted to manipulating public information. The 2024 budget funded fifty-five.

Chicago is not alone. Cities across the country spend enormous amounts on police PR, and even elected officials are often kept in the dark about it.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“Police employing video propagandists has become more common after the murder of George Floyd.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“If you're an amateur, professional, or aspiring journalist in any city in the U.S., a good story for you would be to dig into the budget and number of employees that your local police department devotes to all forms of public relations. There's a reason they try to hide it.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News

“For the most part, America’s criminal justice system isn’t deliberately cruel. It’s just indifferent to the ways in which it breaks human beings. Few police officers want to contribute to mass incarceration or aid in the destruction of poor minority communities. But the absurdities and injustices are inherent in the system. Often, by the time the police get involved, the only available choices are bad ones.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“As I learned more about the juvenile and criminal justice systems, I was reminded of all those jail and prison visits I'd made in my life. What struck me was just how regular it was. We have to take a second to process how messed up that is. We have normalized the abnormal so completely we don't even realize it. Why was this part of Black boys' coming-of-age? Why are some things praised and aspired to? Why are certain things like serving time held up as a badge of honor when they only lead to ruin?”
― Michael K. Williams, Scenes from My Life: A Memoir

“No one wakes up and says they want to be a gangbanger or a drug dealer- that's the last stop on the train. That what you do when you're drowning and reaching out for something- anything- to survive. By the time they get to the corner, there has been a series of things that led to that decision. No one wakes up at the top of the mountain and decides they would like it better down there on the bottom. They end up there out of desperation. We don't spend enough time examining the wider picture, the steps that get them there. We don't tell that part of the story. And to tell half the story is to spread a lie.”
― Michael K. Williams, Scenes from My Life: A Memoir

“The right of chastisement was replaced with a concern for marital harmony...non-interference in the name of marital harmony quickly became an accepted feature of the criminal justice system. Instead of punishing domestic abusers, family courts encourage reconciliation. The also insisted family conflict, including violence, should remain private.”
― Marcia A. Zug

“But, I don’t need to believe in my innocence. I just am innocent.”
“Not to the world out there you’re not.”
― Stephen Nothum, Teething and Other Tales From the American Dystopia

“I use the term "punishment bureaucracy" instead of "criminal justice system" because it is a more accurate and less deceptive way to describe the constellation of public and private institutions that develop, enforce, and profit from criminal law.”
― Alec Karakatsanis, Copaganda: How Police and the Media Manipulate Our News