Chris Gillis

“The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice...The real question of capital punishment in this country is, not do they deserve to die, but do we deserve to kill?”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“Trina had filed a civil suit against the officer who raped her, and the jury awarded her a judgment of $62,000. The guard appealed, and the Court reversed the verdict because the correctional officer had not been permitted to tell the jury that Trina was in prison for murder. Consequently, Trina never received any financial aid or services from the state to compensate her for being violently raped by one of its “correctional” officers. In 2014, Trina turned fifty-two. She has been in prison for thirty-eight years. She is one of nearly five hundred people in Pennsylvania who have been condemned to mandatory life imprisonment without parole for crimes they were accused of committing when they were between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. It is the largest population of child offenders condemned to die in prison in any single jurisdiction in the world.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“In 1955, there was one psychiatric bed for every three hundred Americans; fifty years later, it was one bed for every three thousand.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

“Finally, we spend lots of money. Spending on jails and prisons by state and federal governments has risen from $6.9 billion in 1980 to nearly $80 billion today. Private prison builders and prison service companies have spent millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences, and keep more people locked up so that they can earn more profits. Private profit has corrupted incentives to improve public safety, reduce the costs of mass incarceration, and most significantly, promote rehabilitation of the incarcerated.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption