Michelle Alexander Quotes

The U.S. incarcerates more of its people than any nation in the world, or any nation in history.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world's population has one-fourth of those in prison.

The United States is Fast Becoming One of the Biggest Open-Air Prisons on Earth

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.

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

We have 2.2 million people in prison. It’s a national disgrace.

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.

We are incarcerating more people on a per capita basis in California than any country in the world other than South Africa or the Soviet Union.

Justified by the war on drugs, the United States is in the midst of a prison binge made obvious by the fact that since 1970, the number of people behind bars... has increased 600 percent.

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.

We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.

We think it's OK for us to have the world's largest prison population and for one racial group to be overrepresented therein.

Too many Americans are going to too many prisons for far too long.

The greatest myth about mass incarceration is that it has been driven by crime and crime rates. It's just not true.

The federal prison population increased by almost 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, often at a far faster rate than the Bureau of Prisons could accommodate in their own facilities.

The fact that more than 50 percent of Americans have an immediate family member either currently or formerly incarcerated tells you a lot about just how defining a feature of American culture incarceration has become.

If Americans actually have the conversation about our disastrous prison policies, we'll understand the trends all move in very dangerous directions: we lock up more people, for less violent crime, at ever greater expense, breeding more dangerous criminals who often come out unemployable, violent and isiolated.

What every American should know is that we have more people in jail today than any other country on Earth, more than China. We have some 2.2 million people in jail. What that means is that a lot of lives are being destroyed.

Prisons are hate factories, Pastor, and society wants more and more of them.

The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many of those people deserve to be in prison; however, some of them do not.

Something's going to happen that's going to make us all pay attention at the type of sentences some people are serving and the conditions in which they are served.

I think there are too many people in jail for too long and for not necessarily good reasons.

We the people say it loud and clear every Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as peaceful stretches - More of our population needs to be behind bars.