Criminal justice Quote by Jane Mayer

“Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests…

— Bryan Stevenson

“As law enforcement budgets exploded, so did prison and jail populations. In 1991, the Sentencing Project reported that the number of people behind bars…

— Michelle Alexander

“Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the prime reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million…

— Piper Kerman

“Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the primary reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million…

— Piper Kerman

“Prison presented a solution: jobs for whites, and warehousing for blacks. Mass incarceration “widened the income gap between white and black Americans,”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

The crime bill basically incentivized the prison system. There were quotas, mandatory minimums. You have to serve 85 percent of your time, so it…

— Malcolm Jenkins

Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered.…

— Michelle Alexander

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

— Jerry Weller

The U.S. incarceration binge is not tied to crime. It's a strategy to control the surplus population in a capitalist system that is breaking…

— Jerry Brown

“Merely reducing sentence length, by itself, does not disturb the basic architecture of the New Jim Crow. So long as large numbers of African…

— Michelle Alexander

“The impact of the new caste system is most tragically felt among the young. In Chicago (as in other cities across the United States),…

— Michelle Alexander

“In the federal system alone there were 90,000 prisoners locked up for drug offenses, compared with about 40,000 for violent crimes. A federal prisoner…

— Piper Kerman