Samuel Johnson Quotes

We need prisons because there are some hardcore criminals, but I never met a guy who has been in jail that came out with a smile on his face thinking, 'Right, that's it - now I am going to be good!'

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other. They are worse than ever when, at the termination of their punishment, they return to society.

Once I've done a crime, I just forget it. I go from crime to crime.

One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.

We're recycling very dangerous criminals over and over again.

[We have to make] a distinction between dangerous violent criminals and people who are engaged in non-violent criminal activities….Your taking somebody out of the economy, breaking up their families, and putting them in a place with hardened criminals. I think that it is pretty hard to argue that has been a positive long-term result.

A duty to the public must be to stop prisoners reoffending through successful rehabilitation.

For one crime which is expiated in prison ten thousand are committed thoughtlessly by those who condemn.

If the people would but analyze the human equation of a prison they might better account for the crimes that are visited upon them in cities, towns, and hamlets, ofttimes by men who graduated with an education and equipment for just that sort of retributive service from some penal institution.

Men commit murder and all sorts of mayhem, in a few years they're back on the streets. Highway robbery and white collar crime, and they laugh at the system they beat.

I think of my brother just out of prison again. He will have spent ten years of the last 30 in prison.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

The subject of criminal rehabilitation was debated recently in City Hall. It's an appropriate place for this kind of discussion because the city has always employed so many ex-cons and future cons.

The second time I went to jail, I was like, 'Okay, this is not the move.'

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

If I’m ever released, I do the same again. Exactly the same.

The notion that we should take away educational programs in prisons in order to be tough on crime makes no sense.

These men who come out of prison have offended against society, they cannot expect that society will immediately forget their offense. On the other hand, for its own protection, society would do well to make it possible at least for such men and women as really wish to go straight, to go straight …. I wish that every community from which individuals go to prison might have an organization which would be notified when they are returned to society. It would then be this organization's responsibility to find these individuals a job, suited to their capacities and training, which would bring them a decent living. At the same time some one person beside the parole officer who has a few hundred people to look after, should be responsible for helping these men, and women too, to adjust back to their environment. They must begin to do things for others and to be useful outside of their actual work, or they will not feel themselves anchored permanently to their good intentions.

I went to prison; therefore, I've been rehabilitated, and now I want to get on with my life. I have paid for what I did, end of story.

Incarcerating non-violent offenders in the same population as more dangerous criminals has the effect of inculcating the former into a culture of criminality common among the latter, making them more of a risk to public safety upon release than when they originally went in.

Unfortunately, if the man who leaves the prison gates is just as likely or - as is sometimes grievously the case - more likely to offend as he was when he entered them, then we fail not only the individual but public safety as well.

When you go to jail, you are under the supervision of the state. You are housed with people who are criminals, so that becomes the expectation. People learn to become better criminals in jail and prison.

I don't even think jail helps Gucci Mane. It clearly doesn't.

After six prison commitments, at the end of those, I was more broken than when I went into the system.