Prison Population Quotes

People like myself say, 'Fix the problem. Put him in the general [prison] population. The moral prisoners will deal with him in a way we don't have the nerve to do.'

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.

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.

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 Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

The war on drugs has been the engine of mass incarceration. Drug convictions alone constituted about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1985 and 2000, the period of our prison system's most dramatic expansion.

We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.

In his recent book, When Brute Force Fails, UCLA's Kleiman argues that new strategies for targeting repeat offenders--including reforms to make probation an effective sanction rather than a feckless joke--could cut crime and reduce prison populations simultaneously. Safer communities, in turn, might produce more hopeful and well-disciplined kids.

If you read the biographies of people who have written good books, you often see the point where they suddenly come into themselves, and those weeks in the spring of 1997 were when I came into myself as a writer. They feel like some of the best weeks of writing I’ll ever have. The discovery that I could write better about something as trivial as an ordinary family dinner than I could about the exploding prison population of the United States, and the corporatization of American life, and all the other things I’d been trying to do, was a real revelation.

Between 1995 and 2005, the prison population grew by 30 percent, meaning an additional half million criminals were behind bars, rather than lurking in dark alleys with switchblades. You can well imagine liberals' surprise when the crime rate went down as more criminals were put in prison. The New York Times was reduced to running querulous articles with headlines like Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction and As Crime Rate Drops, the Prison Rate Rises and the Debate Rages.

What defenders of the system typically fail to acknowledge is that the reason violent offenders comprise a fairly large percentage of the state prison population is because they typically receive longer sentences than non-violent offenders.

If all the Atheists & Agnostics left America, they'd lose 93% of The National Academy of Sciences & less than 1% of the prison population.