Susan Kelechi Watson Quotes

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

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?

Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.

First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.

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

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.

There's definitely a way to fix the prison system. First of all, you gotta get a rehabilitation center in prisons, that every inmate must go through.

Incarceration is supposed to keep the community safe from your behavior.

Until you're grown-up they send you to reform school. After you're grown-up they send you to the penitentiary.

Jail and the streets go hand in hand. You can't have one with out the other. They coincide.

I don't feel uncomfortable in forbidding institutions, and work with, say, prisons or psychiatric institutions could be one of the things that evolve out of the Laureateship.

I was in juvenile detention center, and I was in Rikers Island. And there was an anthology written by the inmates called 'The Pen,' and I - you know, I had a crush on a girl, and she left me when I was incarcerated. And I found this poem in this anthology that talked about having your heart broken and being incarcerated.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

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

I remember the people I knew in prison; I was very fortunate to know them - they came from 1910, 1920, 1930.

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.

Prisons are fascinating places, especially when the inmates are educated white-collar types.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted; and by which, during that term, a portion of the prison employment shall be for, and the product thereof be faithfully paid over to, the support of the criminal’s family; and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

We spend $94,000 per prisoner [per year]. There is a tension between punishment and making people’s lives better and I don’t actually think that we have done the second part well. We put people in prison and expect them to come out

Gang members aren't frightened into acceptable behavior by increased penalties, enhanced punishments, and the promise of new detention facilities.

When a young person is sent 'up the river,' we need to remember that all rivers can change course.

I don't often do a lot of that kind of research, but when it's something specific like 'Oz' - which I fortunately did not have a lot of experience with - I will. I read 'The Hot House,' about being on the inside at Leavenworth prison.

It's no beef with Tay-K... Free Tay-K on my momma.