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"Ten million people cycle through our jails every year. The abuses they endure, the diseases they contract, the traumas they suffer inevitably come back to haunt the rest of society. There is no Iron Curtain separating them from us. They are us."
— Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons
by Alan Elsner
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"I believe that we, you and I, the concerned American public, can so alter the American state prison system as to make it obsolete within fifteen years, leaving only a fraction of the present number of inmates incarcerated, often in secure mental hospitals for those who are criminally insane and dangerous to society. The great majority of inmates in the state prisons today are neither criminally insane nor mentally ill."
— Crossing the Yard: Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer
by Richard Shelton
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