Criminal Justice Reform Quotes

“My life, my whole damn life
before that courtroom
before that trial
before that night
was like Africa

And this door leads to a slave ship
And maybe jail maybe jail
is is America”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“Eyes watching through filtered screens
seeing every lie, reading every made-up word

like a black hoodie counts as a mask
like some shit I do with my fingers
counts as gang signs
like a few fights counts as uncontrollable rage
like failing three classes
counts as being dumb as fuck
like everything that I am, that I've ever been
counts as being

guilty”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“Law must never be taken as gospel – today's law may become tomorrow's crime, today's crime may become tomorrow's law.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Mücadele Muhabbet: Gospel of An Unarmed Soldier

“Processed

It's like I'm meat or wheat
Made into a burger or deli slices
Made into pasta or bread
Processed
Not the boy I was before the machine
Before the braking down and pulling apart
Before the adding and taking away

I was made for easy, fast consumption
Like food chains in the hood
Umi said don't go there
That you are what you eat

Those jails that system
has swallowed me whole”
― Ibi Zoboi, Punching the Air

“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

“Unlike prisons, psychiatric institutions can be entered voluntarily, and people often turn to them in pursuit of treatment. But when used involuntarily as prison replacements, hospitals mimic persons in eerie ways— and the most oppressed people experience the brunt of the trauma and violence.”
― Maya Schenwar, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

“There’s a reason for the mainstream bipartisan consensus around community policing: it maintains and expands the status quo. As advocates call for fewer police and less policing and criminalization, community policing becomes a way to reshape the narrative to position police as friendly beat cops who know everyone’s name. But community policing doesn’t make policing more effective, less hostile, or more accountable to the communities they serve in. Instead it allows police to further entrench their presence in neighborhoods, justify increases in their numbers, and even mobilize community members to participate in policing by surveilling our neighbors.”
― Maya Schenwar, Prison by Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms

“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

“For more than a half century, the Right has waged a relentless campaign against the goals and achievements of the Sixties’ movements for racial, social and economic equality. From Reagan to Trump, there has been an endless hammering away at caricatures of dopey hippies, traitorous peace protestors, bra-burning feminists, dangerous Black radicals, and commissars of political correctness.”
― Mike Davis, John Wiener

“He didn’t proselytize at the get-togethers,” Otis recalled. “His talks with us dealt with standing together, respecting our traditions, defending our communities, treating our women with love and care, being responsible toward our children and not taking abuse from the racists in our society.” (On Malcolm X)”
― Mike Davis, John Wiener

“Meanwhile the biggest industry in Los Angeles County was bleeding tens of thousands of entry-level semiskilled jobs. Blue-collar workers everywhere felt the tremors of the so-called Eisenhower Recession of 1958, but in Southern California the primary reason for layoffs was the advent of the Space Age. (Set the Night on Fire)”
― Mike Davis, John Wiener

“Extreme Justice is Extreme Injustice."
- Marcus Cicero

"You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice."
- Bob Marley”
― Lawrence Hartman, GUILTY TILL PROVEN INNOCENT: A Shocking Inside View Into America's Failing Justice System

“As Angela Davis has explained, if we accept uncritically the notion that prisons offer an answer, and that all we must do is improve our so-called justice systems, we evade the 'responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism.' Our ultimate goal-if we truly aim to overcome our nation's habit of constructing enormous systems of racial and social control-cannot simply be to reduce the number of people behind bars. We must strive to create a nation in which caging people en masse-digitally or literally-and stripping them of basic civil and human rights for the rest of their lives is not only unnecessary but unthinkable. . . .

The important question, however, is whether we want to celebrate as 'progress' any development that might reflect the morphing or evolution of the system, rather than its demise. Human rights champion Bryan Stevenson has observed that 'slavery didn't end; it evolved.' Today, we can see, in real time, the system of mass incarceration evolving before our eyes, as enormous investments are made in immigrant detention centers and digital prisons, and as growing numbers of white people become collateral damage in a war that was declared with black people in mind.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Every time the cradle of justice becomes criminal, it falls upon us civilians to be justice incorruptible.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Find A Cause Outside Yourself: Sermon of Sustainability

“All nations seem to have had supreme confidence in the deterrent power of threatened and inflicted pain. They have regarded punishment as the shortest road to reformation...nations have relied on confiscation and degradation, on maimings, whippings, brandings, and exposure to public ridicule and contempt...Curiously enough, the fact is that, no matter how severe the punishments were, the crimes increased.”
― Robert G Ingersoll

“Degradation has been thoroughly tried...and the result was that those who inflicted the punishments became as degraded as their victims.”
― Robert G Ingersoll

“Is it not true that the criminal is a natural product, and that society unconsciously produces these children of vice? Can we not safely take another step, and say that the criminal is a victim, as the diseased and deformed and insane are victims? We do not think of punishing a man because he is afflicted with disease--our desire is to find a cure. We send him, not to the penitentiary, but to the hospital, to an asylum...instead of punishing, we pity. If there are diseases of the mind...as there are diseases of the body...and if these deformities produce what we call vice, why should we punish the criminal, and pity those who are physically diseased?”
― Robert G Ingersoll

“Those who are not affected by the agonies of the bad, will in a little time care nothing for the sufferings of the good.”
― Robert G Ingersoll

“The average man does not wish to employ an ex-convict, because the average man has no confidence in the reforming powers of the penitentiary. He believes that the convict who comes out is worse than the convict who went in.”
― Robert G Ingersoll

“Those who are the fiercest to destroy their fellow men for having committed crimes, are, for the most part, at heart, criminals themselves.”
― Robert G Ingersoll

“Some may be, and probably millions have been, reformed, through kindness, through gratitude--made better in the sunlight of charity. In the atmosphere of kindness the seeds of virtue burst into bud and flower. Cruelty, tyranny, brute force, do not and cannot by any possibility better the heart of man.”
― Robert G Ingersoll