Prison Industrial Complex Quotes

“I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“When you find yourself in dark places, there's always a light somewhere in that darkness, and even if that light is inside of you, you can illuminate your own darkness by shedding that light on the world.”
― Yusef Salaam, Punching the Air

“Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Imprisonment is increasingly used as a strategy of deflection of the underlying social problems—racism, poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and so on.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Incarceration is a sustained, lifetime lynching, meant to discard your soul and make a shell of you in plain life. Make you into your monster self, the beast that comes out when you are forced to survive in the absence of love and safety. Never mind that most of us come broken and traumatized, we still are no longer worth our own humanity. We are a criminal. We need punishment and to be rehabilitated. We need shame and exclusion. We are not worthy of control of our own lives; we are hopeless and evil. We are not individuals or of a womb or a family. We are not absent from anywhere else; because we are here, we simply non-exist. The world is better without us. In this society we are taught our crimes are the summations of our lives and define the limits of our possibility. Our only potential is to harm and destroy.”
― Junauda Petrus, The Stars and the Blackness Between Them

“The majority of people who are in prison are there because society has failed them.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“And maybe
there are small
cracks in our walls
and we start to see
a sliver of light
shine through

in each other”
― Yusef Salaam, Punching the Air

“The conversion of poverty into a personal moral failure was intimately tied to the construction of black Americans as disposable and subject to mass incarceration.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“Increasingly, municipalities (and companies contracted by municipalities) are behaving like businesses, viewing residents as potential sources of revenue, as well as viewing the generation of revenue via fines as a form of productivity.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“The very existence of the prison forecloses the kinds of discussions that we need in order to imagine the possibility of eradicating these behaviors.

Just send them to prison. Just keep on sending them to prison. Then of course, in prison they find themselves within a violent institution that reproduces violence.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“Abolition is not simply about getting rid of the prisons, police or systems of surveillance and punishment; it is about what we build in their place.”
― Sarah Lamble, Abolishing the Police

“Historians will likely wonder how we could describe the new caste system as a system of crime control, when it is difficult to imagine a system better designed to create—rather than prevent—crime.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Every single day, our governments allow many of those who have never killed even a single plant or animal to starve to death, but feed—more than once—many of those who have each killed many people intentionally.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Moreover, it is not merely a matter of a few white people being sadistic; whiteness as a category is, in part, maintained by ritualized violence against black people and white consumption of spectacularized images of antiblack violence.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“However, to maintain a good credit rating during periods when revenue is lagging, municipalities must fuck over residents by implementing austerity measures such as firing public employees, cutting pension funds and health-care benefits, weakening the power of labor unions, cutting the education budget, and so forth.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“I'm the capital for one of the most profitable money making institutions in modern history: the prisons. Man, before they had gente pickin cotton or coffee or lettuce, but now they don't even need our muscles, Homes! They just throw us in these cages where we play dominoes and spades while they cash in on our spirits. My actual body is their capital, their profit. I feed the guards, lawyers, and judges' children and educate them through college, so they can then before the lawyers that lock all of our asses up!...Come on, man. The California prison guard union is the strongest prison union in the world. The aint here to guard us from society; they're here to protect their investment: me.”
― Benjamin Bac Sierra, Pura Neta

“The existing criminal justice model poses two main questions in the face of social harm: Who did it? How can we punish them? (And increasingly, how can we make money from it?). Creating safe and healthy communities requires a different set of questions: Who was harmed? How can we facilitate healing? How can we prevent such harm in the future? --S. Lamble”
― Eric A. Stanley, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

“It's a free country. Inmates once bought this. Thus, they're inmates.”
― Brian Spellman, We have our difference in common 2.

“... all over the world the institution of the prison serves as a place to warehouse people who represent major social problems... prison serves as an institution that consolidates the state's inability and refusal to address the most pressing social problems of this era.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement

“The vast majority of states continue to withhold the right to vote when prisoners are released on parole. Even after the term of punishment expires, some states deny the right to vote for a period ranging from a number of years to the rest of one’s life. This is far from the norm in other countries—like Germany, for instance, which allows (and even encourages) prisoners to vote. In fact, about half of European countries allow all incarcerated people to vote, while others disqualify only a small number of prisoners from the polls. Prisoners vote either in their correctional facilities or by some version of absentee ballot in their town of previous residence. Almost all of the countries that place some restrictions on voting in prison are in Eastern Europe, part of the former Communist.
No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“In other words, their [police] survival and expansion becomes bound up with their capacity to use the police power and the court system to loot residents.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“This evolution in the social function of the state from provider of social services to provider of security also represented an evolution in how racialized populations in the United States would be manged. The project of dismantling the welfare state gained legitimacy through the association of social entitlements with blackness.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“As Iyko Day notes, Native dispossession occurs through the expropriation of land, while black dispossession is characterized by enslavement and bodily dispossession.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“But what exactly is primitive accumulation? It entails the creation of a labor market and a system of private property achieved through the violent process of dispossessing people of their land and ways of life so that they can be converted into workers for capitalists.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“The financialization of municipalities, the loss of key tax revenue streams, deindustrialization, and capital flight are the causes of the fiscal crisis—not reckless public spending.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“In April 2014 a settlement agreement was reached in court, and Detroit had to pay $85 million to USB AG and Bank of America Corporation to terminate the swaps. The use of variable-rate instruments, such as swaps, to finance debt was the single "biggest contributing factor to the increase in Detroit's legacy expenses.”
― Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism

“In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2 million people today (10),”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Young Readers’ Edition: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“As if they are a mountaineer climbing across the great slopes of Mount Everest, meth monkeys take quite the health risk. Their minds become mush due to sleep deprivation. Like pillows with way too many hours of sleep invested into them, these minds exhaust themselves and become overworked. Like that of old television shows, their minds become reruns on repeat.”
― James Allen Firth

“When a loved one is incarcerated, it's like an atom bomb falls on them, obliterating everything in an instant. Their freedom, their movement, their livelihood, gone. But the bomb's shock waves spread out and envelop close family and friends too. The prison industrial complex eats incarcerated people as the main course but also feasts on their relatives, relationships, and communities. Its appetite is voracious.”
― Wajahat Ali, Go Back to Where You Came From: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American

“Since 1865, when the [Thirteenth] Amendment was passed, Black men were getting charged, set up, arrested, and convicted for the pettiest of offenses--like child support. They were getting harsher punishments and longer sentences than their white counterparts. That way, the cotton could still get picked and the tobacco could still get plucked. The Confederate way of making money could still survive despite the abolishment of slavery.”
― Amy Watkins