Prison Abolition Quotes

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

A system that warehouses people is not the cure for social ills

I believe we are nearing a time when a combination of technology and radical thinking will make it possible for much more intensive and restrictive conditions to be applied in more creative and fundamental ways outside of prison.

Some prison officials are determined to keep the people they lock in cages as ignorant as possible about the racial, social, and political forces that have made the United States the most punitive nation on earth. Perhaps they worry the truth might actually set the captives free.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

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

Mass incarceration and its never-ending human toll will be with us until we come to see that no crime justifies permanent civic death.

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

The status quo tough-on-crime policies of the '90s and 2000s are not working and are not popular. And it provides me with hope about the possibilities for San Francisco and this whole country in terms of moving away from our dependence on prisons and jails to solve social problems.

In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.

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

Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.

If we went back to the imprisonment rate we had in the early '70s, something like four out of five people employed in the prison industry would lose their jobs. That's what you're up against.

Today, 15 years after crime peaked, the American prison system has become a leviathan unmatched in human history. Never has a supposedly ‘free country’ denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens…. We have become a nation of jailers.

We need to have more second chance programs. I'm glad that we're ending private prisons in the federal system; I want to see them ended in the state system.

After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

We rarely have good alternatives to offer to prison - that's our default.

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

Our system never treated the failure of prison as a reason not to try more prison.

The great gift of 'Incarceration Nations' is that, by introducing a wide range of approaches to crime, punishment, and questions of justice in diverse countries - Rwanda, South Africa, Brazil, Jamaica, Uganda, Singapore, Australia and Norway - it forces us to face the reality that American-style punishment has been chosen.

I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.

Mass incarceration will have to be dismantled the same way it was constructed: piecemeal, incrementally and, above all, locally.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

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

Conservatives will fight hard to preserve the institutions of mass incarceration and police brutality. Because they don't see themselves as victims of these things, but as benefactors, they will fight hard to preserve the status quo against a reform candidate.