Shira Scheindlin Quotes

Manditory minimums were almost always excessive, and they made me feel unethical, even dirty.

The fact that the United States, with less than 5 percent of the world's population incarcerates 25% of the world's prisoners is largly due to manditory minimum sentences.

While I bore the titel of "Honorable Judge", I felt less than honorable and moroe like a complicit tool of an unjust system.

Mandatory minimum sentences should be abolished.

At least 80 percent of American prisoners are grossly over-sentenced. The Supreme Court knows this, but shows scant concern for this human side of criminal justice.

There are reasons to doubt that our criminal justice system is fundamentally just.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Many of those people deserve to be in prison; however, some of them do not.

Something's going to happen that's going to make us all pay attention at the type of sentences some people are serving and the conditions in which they are served.

No man e'er felt the halter draw, With good opinion of the law.

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

Going to prison, for me, was like seeing my death before it happened.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released.

Every punishment is based, not on logic or the feeling of justice, but on the desire to wish evil on those who have done evil to you or to another person…. Everything about our present system of punishments and about all criminal law will be thought of by future generations in the same way that we think of cannibalism or human sacrifice to the pagan gods. “How did they not see the uselessness and cruelty of those things which they did?” our descendants will say about us.

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

My mother negotiated a plea deal, and my father went to trial. I think one thing we notice in their case that kind of stands out is how, in some ways, arbitrary the outcomes in the criminal justice system can be. And they did basically the same thing, identical thing.

There's an awful lot about our criminal justice system that is dysfunctional. Everyone who sets foot in a criminal courtroom will see myriad ways the system is dysfunctional.

I have done prison time for 13 years without any conviction.

America has the longest prison sentences in the West, yet the only condition long sentences demonstrably cure is heterosexuality.

Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.

You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been conservative on crime.

I think there are too many people in jail for too long and for not necessarily good reasons.

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

We make no apology for people who should be in prison being in prison.

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.