29 Quotes About Mass-incarceration






  • Author Bryan Stevenson
  • Quote

    American prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. Mass incarceration has been largely ruled by misguided drug policy and excessive sentencing, but the internment of hundreds of thousands of poor and mentally ill people has been a driving force in achieving our record levels of imprisonment.

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  • Author Jackie Wang
  • Quote

    As the U.S. deindustrialized and the welfare state was gutted (a process that started in the 1970s), the solution to the problem of what to do with the unemployed people who had migrated to cities to become industrial workers—as well as the mentally ill people housed in hospitals that were shutting down en masse—was racialized mass incarceration. (pg. 56)

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  • Author Sunny Schwartz
  • Quote

    Deputy sheriffs had always held the power in the jails. They controlled the culture of the place. if they didn't like you or what you were doing in the programs, then you weren't going to succeed. It didn't matter if you had developed a pill that would solve all the prisoners' problems in one swallow. If they thought prisoners were animals who deserved to be treated like garbage, then that's how they were treated.

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