Shaun King Quotes

I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.

I want to see changes in our criminal justice system.

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.

In January 2013, I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative.

I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum.

I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population.

Electing radical reformers as district attorneys is huge. It's essential.

What we're doing in San Francisco and what we're doing with other criminal justice partners across the state and across the country is anything but indiscriminate. We are being careful. We are being focused and surgical in our efforts to decrease the jail population.

I'm suggesting that we abolish the social function of prisons.

We the people say it loud and clear every Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as peaceful stretches - More of our population needs to be behind bars.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

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

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.

If we have to build more prisons, it means we have failed.

The criminal justice system is not working and people want something that works.

In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.

Victims of crime and the wider community deserve a grown-up debate on our criminal justice system and how we can make it work - for those within it and for those it protects.

The purpose of the criminal justice system is both to rehabilitate and to punish. If we can rehabilitate somebody, that's a huge, huge win.

We need criminal justice reform. You have heard people talk about that all over the country. I was able to work on that specific issue at home.

The claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: For the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted and jailed.

We need transformational change of our criminal justice system - not just, you know, a handful of consent decrees or policy reforms.

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

One of my priorities is criminal justice reform, and there is certainly bipartisan appetite for that. I think we need to eliminate the cash bail system. We need to eliminate mandatory minimums. We need sentencing reform. I think we need parole reform as well.

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

I want to look at the community I came from and what role incarceration has played there.