Ken Cuccinelli Quotes

We should be extremely cautious about continuing to increase sentences as a routine response to concerns over crime.

If we believe in our current penal process, then the penalties imposed by judges and juries should be the only sanctions for one's crime, not the invisible sanctions of the legislature.

Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.

It's not crime that makes us more punitive in the United States. It's the way we respond to crime and how we view those people who have been labeled criminals.

Given the devastation that crime can visit on families and communities, I will err on being a little too tough on crime than being too soft on crime.

Every day, lax sentencing costs lives.

No one would normally accuse me of being soft on crime.

Societies have debated the severity of punishment for vile acts over millennia, with complex moral arguments on both sides of the question. But citizens and society should pay more attention to the trend of over-criminalisation of common human failings and frailties.

We must be particularly careful when we enact policies in response to a specific crime, a specific type of crime, or crime wave simply by increasing punishments.

The act of policing is, in order to punish less often, to punish more severely.

Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

For the past seven years we have been cracking down on crime in Missouri, passing tougher laws for drug crimes and sex offenses and requiring prisoners to serve more time.

A far greater factor than abolishing poverty is the deterrent effect of swift and certain consequences: swift arrest, prompt trial, certain penalty and - at some point - finality of judgment.

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

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

I'm not in favor of the death penalty. But I'm in favor of locking these people away in maximum security units where they can never get out. They can never escape. They can never be paroled. Lock the bad ones away. But you gotta rethink everybody else.

More prisons, more enforcement, effective death penalty.

Any politician who wants to eliminate parole just doesn’t understand law enforcement.

I'm very tough on crimes where there are victims who have been physically harmed. In such cases, I do not believe in leniency.

What has too often happened in the past is that people have threatened punishment but have failed to carry it out. It's imperative in any initiative that is undertaken that punishment be real and that there be truth in sentencing, and that the truly dangerous offenders - the recidivists and the career criminals - be put away and kept away.

The majority of our criminals that we lock up are non-violent offenders.

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

I believe indeterminate sentencing can be extremely useful, but I also believe that any such system should always take into consideration the special knowledge as to the facts in a case which only the trial judge possesses.

Circumstances of crimes vary. So do motives. And so do prospects for rehabilitation. The number of imponderables makes it impossible to sentence by formula and still sentence justly.

As a law-enforcement official, as a politician, you are always going to have in the back of your mind the fear that someone you release will end up committing another crime, potentially a serious crime, during a period when they otherwise would have been incarcerated.