Incarceration Nations Quotes

“As love is an action word, justice is a verb. Justice is a journey. It is never static, never contented, never at ease. Justice is a movement; justice is movement.”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“It’s as if the country’s drug laws manufacture offenders, not so they can have the pleasure of stoning them—this was the old, revenge-hungry way—but so they can have the self-righteous joy of rehabilitating them. It all adds up to one more way to enact Singaporean efficiency: Look how productively, how humanely we do reentry. The problem is, this performance demands a sinner, and today I met four of them. Sinners who feel more like scapegoats.”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“if the public decries prison, the politicians will. If prison can be marketed to the public, so can antiprison.”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“The prison restaurant, just outside the barbed wire, is a big local draw, both for the built-in gimmick of being staffed by prisoners, as part of their culinary training, and for the quality of the food. Today there’s a popular local TV show filming here, interviewing officers stationed by the ladies’ room and hungry patrons devouring noodles. At the table, doily place mats, quilted pink menus, and matching pink chopstick holders mark each seat. Waitresses in pink dresses, sporting those same affectless looks I’d faced all day, take our order and place spicy papaya salad and pad thai before us. Next door the gift shop sells prisoner-made goods and also doubles as a massage parlor. Rifling through pillows, place mats, and purses embroidered with little Thai girls at the playground, trying to determine if making purchases would constitute supporting the prison system or, instead, the efforts to reform it, I spy one more framed royal photo. There’s the king’s nephew, pants rolled up, enjoying a foot massage from an incarcerated trainee.”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“In 2003 the Thai government changed its policy on methamphetamine overnight, classifying it as a first-degree narcotic. This sent the prison system to its highest levels ever, and to near bankruptcy. The government drew up suspect lists of alleged dealers and used financial incentives to encourage arrests. Informants would get 15 percent of the value of seized assets, arresting officials up to 40 percent. Crackdowns resulted in thousands being killed in the streets; officials claimed these killings were the result of gang warfare but international human rights watchdogs exposed them to be extrajudicial killings by an agitated police force.”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“President Kagame’s response to this crisis was unusual. Let them go, he decreed. First the elderly prisoners, in 1998. Then, in 2003, a mass release of 24,000 prisoners, including the terminally ill, those who had participated in the government confession program, those under fourteen during the genocide.”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“But I’m not here to dwell on the sensational. Instead, I’m interested in learning how cracks let in light.”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“Trekking through prison history was a sobering expedition, leaving me feeling as if I’d encountered some insidious, and very expensive, worldwide plot.”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“Alas, the twentieth century alone, in which more than 50 million people were murdered by "civilized" government decrees - during Nazi Germany, the Armenian genocide, the Soviet regime, and so on - has proved how easy it is for good people to turn mass murderers.
... This reality - the human capacity, our capacity, for evil - should not distance us from those who commit atrocities. Quite the contrary, it should remind us of a fine line: if not for some grace, there go we.”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“As love is an action word, justice is a verb. Justice is a journey. It is never static, never contented, never at ease. Justice is a movement; justice is movement. —”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“I ask this about crime in general. What if it became an opportunity not to cultivate an us-versus-them mentality but an us-and-them ethos? Not a chance to engender separation from others but a profound reminder of how deeply interconnected we are, such that one person’s actions have the capacity to impact so many? This, surely, is utopia. For”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“Higher-education programs like mine, dramatically correlated with lower recidivism rates, were decimated in 1994, when incarcerated students were made ineligible for federal and state financial aid. Prison college programs, once numbering around 350, dropped down to seven in the span of a single year. I”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World

“In other words, punishing people perpetuates destructive actions—and thus increases crime—by amplifying resentments. Forgiveness promotes social order and peace. —”
― Baz Dreisinger, Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World