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.

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.

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.

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

I want to see changes in our criminal justice system.

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 agree with President Obama and Attorney General Holder that we need to reform our criminal sentencing laws.

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.

To change criminal justice policy in any meaningful way means to propose changing a very longstanding system. It's not realistic to think you can do it overnight.

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

There's nothing conservative about allowing ourselves to become so inured to a 'tough on crime' frame of mind that we would abandon tested alternatives that can yield better outcomes.

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.

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

People have started to see that 'smart on crime' rather than 'tough on crime' makes sense.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

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.

My dream is to reform the legal system over the next 20 years.

I realize I will always be the poster child for police brutality, but I can try to use that as a positive force for healing and restraint.

We must stop the trend of closing schools and building prisons.

I think transportation and corrections are not the first two areas that I would go looking for massive change.

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

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.

We need to keep making our streets safer and our criminal justice system fairer - our homeland more secure, our world more peaceful and sustainable for the next generation.

Our laws are too lax, our justice system too weak - particularly when it comes to violent, dangerous offenders.

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.