Clint Smith Quotes

Unfortunately, the elimination of incentives such as parole, good time credits and funding for college courses, means that fewer inmates participate in and excel in literacy, education, treatment and other development programs.

Once you have a felony conviction on your record, one of the most difficult things to do is to break the cycle of recidivism.

Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone. Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill?

We lose our right to be surprised that California has the highest recidivism rate in the country if we refuse to hire folks who have taken responsibility for their crimes and have done their time.

This is not rocket science. If you mentor and support people when they leave prison they're less likely to reoffend.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both.

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 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.'

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

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.

We can agree that keeping serious criminals in prison is an effective means of preserving public safety, but we must also recognize that the axiom of 'putting people in jail and throwing away the key' does not apply to all offenders universally and can actually be counterproductive.

Rather than serving in the U.S. Senate for almost 20 years or having so many other wonderful life experiences, I could have served a longer sentence in prison for some of the stupid, reckless things I did as a teenager.

We must do better by offenders who are sent to prison to make them less likely to return.

It has to be about more than punishment. We need to rehabilitate people. We lock up far too many people in America today. We lock them up as if locking them up is gonna solve the problem. And locking them up does not solve the problem. Did locking me up make me better? No, it did not. It made my struggle harder.

We've been addicted to incarceration as a primary response for decades, whether or not it's a good use of resources, whether or not it's humane, whether or not it is effective at keeping us safe, rehabilitating or healing victims.

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.

Fundamentally, as human beings, we're very, very alike and a lot more alike than we think, but we have a tendency to divide the world into them and us. In prison, when people commit a crime and we put them away, they definitely become "them." We don't want to deal with it because they have chosen to step out of society, so we're going to keep them out. Even if they serve their time, we're going to make sure that, for the rest of their lives, they're going to be branded. I don't know how to do it in a different way, but I think it clearly doesn't work.

Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars?

Whilst long prison sentences will always be right for those who commit the most serious crimes, particularly of a violent or sexual nature, the fact is that the vast majority of all offenders will at some point be released.

We continue to work on policy to end discrimination against people with criminal records.

'Lockup,' inside America's supersize prisons on MSNBC, is one of my favorite shows. I get a lot of my inspiration for Blair Waldorf from that show.

I want to see prison numbers come down. We need better custody that cuts reoffending and crime. And we need to ensure judges, magistrates and the public have full confidence in the other penalties available.

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

At the age of 46, in my sixth prison term, it was the second prison I was in - California Rehabilitation Center. The California Civil Education program kind of opened up all of the experiences that that I had dealt with in my life, that I had experienced.