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Prison
Reform
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I
think there’s something to be optimistic about because
I believe that many people throughout the country
and world are starting to realize that we’ve made
some deep, deep mistakes in terms of building prisons
to the detriment and exclusion of building up our
educational systems. Developing punitive programs
for teens instead of focusing on programs that will
really benefit and advantage our children.
-- Ellen
Barry
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We've
entered a disturbing period that promotes a retributionist,
punitive attitude toward people in our society who haven't
'made it,' who are underdogs, who don't have the financial
means that other people have, and who may have disabilities
like mental illness and addictions to deal with,"
-- Ellen
Barry
We
live in a country that is addicted to incarceration
as a tool for social control. As it stands now justice
systems are extremely expensive, do not rehabilitate
but in fact make the people that experience them worse
and have no evidence based correlatives to reducing
crime. Yet with that track record they continue to thrive,
prosper and are seen as an appropriate response to children
in trouble with the law. Only an addict would see that
as an okay result.
-- James
Bell |
|
“Society
has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where
there are throw-away people.”
-- James
Bell
“Our
justice system is one of the few unaccountable systems in
the country. It doesn’t make decisions based on best practices…or
in the best interest of the young people and families involved.
As a result, there is a 70 percent recidivism rate. The
decision makers can administer this misery and not take
any responsibility for the outcome.”
-- James
Bell
If you
want to address racial disparity in the juvenile justice
system, everybody has to have a role in it. Everybody has
some responsibility."
-- James
Bell
There
is a multi-headed, multi-tentacled monster out there devouring
blacks who live in certain neighborhoods. Incarceration
is just one aspect of this menace, but it is an overwhelmingly
damaging aspect. Our job, in working to achieve fairness
and equity, is to sound the alarm about the unjust criminal
justice system and demand that our leaders and those in
power act now to halt this destructive, unfair treatment
of our brothers and sisters, especially of our children.
-- James
Bell
Together
we must challenge individuals, communities, cities, counties,
regions, states, and the nation to be accountable for the
outcomes of the justice systems at every level of government.
-- James
Bell
 |
"Torture
is banned but in two-thirds of the world's countries
it is still being committed in secret. Too many governments
still allow wrongful imprisonment, murder or "disappearance"
to be carried out by their officials with impunity."
-- Peter
Benenson
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"Open
your newspaper - any day of the week - and you will find
a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned,
tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are
unacceptable to his government."
-- Peter
Benenson
"The
candle burns not for us, but for all those whom we failed
to rescue from prison, who were shot on the way to prison,
who were tortured, who were kidnapped, who "disappeared".
That's what the candle is for."
-- Peter
Benenson
"Once
the concentration camps and the hell-holes of the world
were in darkness. Now they are lit by the light of the Amnesty
candle; the candle in barbed wire. When I first lit the
Amnesty candle, I had in mind the old Chinese proverb: 'Better
light a candle than curse the darkness.'"
-- Peter
Benenson
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"The
line that connects the bombing of civilian populations
to the mountain removed by strip mining ... to the
tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight. We're
living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare
-- warfare against human beings, other creatures and
the Earth itself."
~ Wendell
Berry
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"The
most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is
the mind of the oppressed."
-- Stephen
Biko
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*
How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent
of inner-city children do not drop out of school,
thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?
-- Grace
Lee Boggs
|
I believe
that we are at the point now, in the United States, where
a movement is beginning to emerge. I think that the calamity,
the quagmire of the Iraq war, the outsourcing of jobs, the
drop-out of young people from the education system, the
monstrous growth of the prison-industrial complex, the planetary
emergency, which we are engulfed at the present moment,
is demanding that instead of just complaining about these
things, instead of just protesting about these things, we
begin to look for, and hope for, another way of living.
And I think that-- that's where the movement-- I-- I see
a movement beginning to emerge, 'cause I see hope beginning
to trump despair.
-- Grace
Lee Boggs
They
are torturing people. They are torturing people on Guantanamo
Bay. They are engaging in acts which amount to torture in
the medieval sense of the phrase. They are engaging in good
old-fashioned torture, as people would have understood it
in the Dark Ages.
-- Richard Bourke
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“I
am writing these short but deeply felt words from
the bottom of my heart, which in spite of these mouldy
walls and these rusty chains with which they try to
imprison me, beats faster than ever in the cause of
liberty.
-- Luz
Perly Córdoba Mosquera
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"All
human beings, whatever their cultural or historical
background, suffer when they are intimidated, imprisoned
or tortured . . . We must, therefore, insist on a
global consensus, not only on the need to respect
human rights worldwide, but also on the definition
of these rights . . . for it is the inherent nature
of all human beings to yearn for freedom, equality
and dignity, and they have an equal right to achieve
that."
--
14th
Dalai Lama
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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.
-- Angela
Davis
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"Imprisonment
has become the response of first resort to far too
many of our social problems."
-- Angela
Davis
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*
Years
ago I recognized my kinship with all living things,
and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better
than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say
now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it;
while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while
there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
-- Eugene
V. Debs
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“While
we diminish the stimulant of fear, we must increase
to prisoners the incitements of hope, in proportion
as we extinguish the terrors of the law, we should awaken
and strengthen the control of the conscience.”
-- Dorothea
Dix |
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The
degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering
its prisons.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Never
work just for money. Money alone won't save your soul
or build a decent family life or help you sleep at
night. We're the richest nation on Earth, with the
highest number of imprisoned people in the world.
Our drug addictions and child poverty are among the
highest in the industrialized world. So don't ever
confuse wealth or fame with character.
-- Marian
Wright Edelman
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History
has a long-range perspective. It ultimately passes stern
judgment on tyrants and vindicates those who fought, suffered,
were imprisoned, and died for human freedom, against political
oppression and economic slavery.
-- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
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You
can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy
this body, but you will never imprison my mind.
-- Mohandas
Gandhi
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We must
not allow this generation to produce record numbers for
the juvenile justice, runaway and homeless youth, or foster
care systems.
-- Ruben Hinojosa
*
“Sexual abuse and rape in our prisons are the epitome
of the dehumanizing nature of our entire correctional
system. Prison rape is a human rights issue; it's a
public health issue; and it's a public safety issue.”
-- Barbara
Lee |
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If
you don't want to be beaten, imprisoned, mutilated,
killed or tortured then you shouldn't condone such behavior
towards anyone, be they human or not.
-- Moby |
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When
shall it be said in any country of the world, my poor
are happy; neither ignorance or distress is to be found
among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets
of beggers; the aged are not in want, the taxes are
not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, becausei
am friend of its happiness; when these things can be
said, then may that country boast of its constitution
and government.
-- Thomas
Paine |
Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously
the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners
and the fact that, army people might be made to pay
a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable
to?
-- Arundhati
Roy |
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"I
don’t belong to a church or political party or a group
of any kind. I feel that Amnesty International is the
most civilized organization in history. Its currency
is the written word. Its weapon is the letter; that’s
why I am a member. I believe in its non-violence; I
believe in its effectiveness. Its dignity and its sense
of commitment. Its focus on individuals and the concentration
and tenacity with which they defend those imprisoned
for their ideas has earned it the cautious respect of
repressive governments throughout the world."
-- Sting
|
"On the collective level, we have unwittingly shifted
from being a nation of liberators, defenders of freedom,
into becoming a nation of arms dealers and mercenaries,
fabricating our own weapons of mass destruction and
arming tyrants with the tools to oppress their own people.
Within our own society, we jail more prisoners than
any other country in the world, 85 percent of them people
of nonwhite races — red, black, brown, and yellow. We
are one of the few nations that still indulge in the
death penalty for increasing numbers of these prisoners.
We must become mindful of these negative things, since
we need not support these actions of our nation to be
affected negatively by their evolutionary impact, unless
we mentally, verbally, and ultimately physically, disassociate
ourselves from them."
-- Robert
Thurman |
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If
we are to have the public conversations essential
to taking on serious dilemmas from climate change
to criminal justice reform, we need forums for those
conversations. The media can facilitate the conversations
or shut them down. They can open up or constrain our
beliefs about what is possible, what is desirable,
who is deserving, and which perspectives are legitimate.
-- Sarah
van Gelder
|
There
is much to be done, there is much that can be done…
one person of integrity can make a difference, a difference
of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison,
our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is
hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame.
What all these victims need above all is to know that
they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them,
that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them
ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the
quality of our freedom depends on theirs.
-- Elie
Wiesel |
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"Good
care is taken that each state shall have its prisons
. . . and other asylums; but not one building is erected
nor one law enforced that would teach the people how
not to contribute to these over-crowded receptacles
of human misery . . . . All of our politicians are
ready to deal with the effects, but not one of them
is brave enough to penetrate the substratum of society
and deal with the cause." distributed among the people.
. .
-- Victoria
Woodhull
|
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"A reform
in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death
penalty shall no longer be inflicted . . . and by which
our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into
vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may
emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated
citizens they now are."
-- Victoria
Woodhull
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"Chinese
and Tibetan dissidents are either locked up in prison,
forced into hiding, or silenced by fear of police
retaliation against their families. All the happiness
about China's economic growth has made many Americans
forget that police clubs and guns and the Laogai system
keep the Communist Party in power. Moreover, it is
still little recognized how American resources help
to sustain that power through trade, investments,
and the transfer of technology... It is only when
the Laogai is abolished in China that real change
will come about."
-- Harry
Wu
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