Matt Gonzalez Quotes

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

The United States imprisons many non-violent offenders who could instead be required to pay fines, perform community service, and make restitution to their victims… Maintaining our vast network of prisons consumes resources that could be better spent on education and other crime prevention efforts... Rather than reforming offenders, prison too often degrades and dehumanizes prisoners, making the task of rehabilitation and reentry into society even more difficult.

Instead of investing our resources in locking people up, let's invest more of those resources in our fellow citizens so they don't end up in the system to begin with. And if they do, they can get back on their feet.

I don't believe in killing people. I believe in locking you up for the rest of your life.

I think one of the things that I don't think people focus on is that there are some red states that have done some really innovative things when it comes to criminal justice reform, including on rehabilitation, reentry efforts. I think one of the things that we have seen in that regard is that you save money.

We spend an awful lot of money on the criminal justice system that could better be spent at the other end of the spectrum.

I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them…

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

Prison works.

We'll get way further if we educate people and not lock them up.

We rarely have good alternatives to offer to prison - that's our default.

Violent felons and people with mental health problems need to be rehabilitated.

I would make the case that the vast majority of prisoners leave prison and go back into society. We share that society with them and what sort of people do we want them to be.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

I don't want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.

Yeah, I've gotten a few letters from prison.

I should still be in jail.

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?

'Getting smart on crime' does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.

The essence to reducing violent crime in our society is to take these people [criminals] off the street.

Bad people should be incarcerated.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

But passing by all other considerations, and contemplating merely the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them.

The war on drugs is a war on our own families …. We have to move from a system that punishes to a system that treats.