Photoset

"Our society--the society we have made--creates criminogenic conditions in our sprawling urban ghettos, and then acts out rituals of punishment against them as some awful form of human sacrifice." -- Glenn C. Laury

"A black boy born in 2001 has a one in three chance of going to prison in his lifetime and a Latino boy a one in six chance of the same fate. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world: 7.1 million adult residents--one in 33--are under some form of correctional supervision including prison, jail, probation, or parole." -- Marian Wright Edelman

"There are more African-Americans under correctional control today--in prison or jail, on probation or parole--than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began." -- Michelle Alexander

"When Angela Davis attacked the prison system, she talked about perhaps 250,000 or 300,000 people imprisoned throughout all of the US as a problem to be dealt with, a crisis, a situation that bordered on fascism. Fast forward 30-40 years to the present, today [there are] more than 300,000 prisoners in California alone, one state out of fifty. The imprisonment in California alone exceeds that of France, Belgium, and England--I could name 4-5 countries combined." -- Mumia Abu Jamal

"The prison-industrial complex is not only a mechanism to convert public tax money into profits for private corporations; it is an essential element of modern neo-liberal capitalism. It serves two purposes. One, to neutralize and contain huge segments of potentially rebellious sectors of the population, and two, to sustain a system of super-exploitation, where mainly black and Latino captives are imprisoned in white rural overseer communities." -- Assata Shakur