Prison Reform Quotes

“It becomes more and more difficult to avoid the idea of black men as subjects of not just racial profiling but of an insidious form of racial obliteration sanctioned by silence.”
― Aberjhani, Illuminated Corners: Collected Essays and Articles Volume I.

“Every society has the criminals that it deserves.”
― 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.”
― Jack Kerouac, 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.”
― 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.”
― Anthony Ray Hinton, The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row

“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.”
― Anthony Ray Hinton, 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).”
― Bernard B. Kerik

“They call it free time
and it's the biggest lie
because we are
still here”
― Ibi Zoboi, 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.”
― Cornel West, Black Prophetic Fire

“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.”
― Ashley Asti, I Have Waited for You: Letters from Prison

“It is not the prisoners that need reformation. It is the prisons.”
― 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/”
― Michelle Alexander, 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.”
― Erica R. Meiners, 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.”
― Jane Garland, 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.”
― Mikita Brottman, 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.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

“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.”
― Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?