Tom Rooney Quotes

We've got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians.

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

Everybody knows that prison is not a good place for anyone, and nobody would feel proud to be there. But I'd like to mention that I was treated really well in there.

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

I didn't spend a lot of time with prison guards, but my father was an assistant district attorney for a long time so I was always hearing stories about prisoners and prison guards.

We have determined as a society, as a country, as a people, that the incarceration and the supervision and the specific fines for a particular crime are that person's debt to society.

We make no apology for people who should be in prison being in prison.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison.

I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.

I've definitely become more aware of the penal system and more aware of what life could be like inside a prison.

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

Too many Americans are going to too many prisons for far too long.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

My buddy tells me a lot of interesting stories about what goes on in prison - it just makes my head spin about what they deal with on a day-to-day basis.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

People in general have a preconceived idea of what prison is, from seeing documentaries or whatever.

I am proud of being in a U.S. federal prison and surviving it.

I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.

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.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.

More prisons, more enforcement, effective death penalty.

Outside of a few national security issues like treason that the Constitution lays out, we don't need federal crimes, and we don't need federal prisons. We need state crimes and state prisons.

The newest "fad" of the penologists is "indeterminate sentences".... This plan ... will work first rate if God will agree to act as the discharging officer. It is hardly likely, though, that he would accept the position: he has long been out of politics.