Eleanor Roosevelt Quotes

These men who come out of prison have offended against society, they cannot expect that society will immediately forget their offense. On the other hand, for its own protection, society would do well to make it possible at least for such men and women as really wish to go straight, to go straight …. I wish that every community from which individuals go to prison might have an organization which would be notified when they are returned to society. It would then be this organization's responsibility to find these individuals a job, suited to their capacities and training, which would bring them a decent living. At the same time some one person beside the parole officer who has a few hundred people to look after, should be responsible for helping these men, and women too, to adjust back to their environment. They must begin to do things for others and to be useful outside of their actual work, or they will not feel themselves anchored permanently to their good intentions.

I knew hundreds and hundreds of women like me, who had traveled in and out of prison in a revolving door. They needed support and help just like I had received. And it could make a difference, just like it had made a difference in my life. I wanted to see them come back to the community and have a chance at a different life, too.

Studies have shown that inmate participation in education, vocational and job training, prison work skills development, drug abuse, mental health and other treatment programs, all reduce recidivism, significantly.

We also need people like social workers, volunteers, the Christian Industrial League, drug treatment programs to make sure you are getting them a job. That's what you have to do. Otherwise, we just keep stepping around these things.

Restoring a person's ability to achieve success when they leave the prison walls promotes public safety, builds our economy and, most importantly, is the right thing to do.

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.

Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.

I don't want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.

City and state governments did little or nothing to orient the new migrants, help them find jobs, master complex bus and trolley systems to get to where the jobs were, and to make landlords repair decayed rooms—all measures requiring money invested at the start but saving billions in later welfare, crime, and compacted bitter racial and ethnic tensions.

We spend ninety-five cents of every dollar for prisons on pure custody; iron bars and stone walls; and they dehumanize. We spend five cents on hope—health mental health, education, vocational training, employment services, family guidance, community services. Most of these inmates have never been to a dentist. Psychoses and neuroses—a major cause of crime—are immense.

We are obliged – obliged – to do everything we can so that when they are released, they don’t come back.

Merely responding with a “relief check” to complicated social and personal problems … is not likely to provide a lasting solution. Such a check must be supplemented with … by positive services and solutions offering the total resources of the community to meet the total needs of family to help our less fortunate citizens help themselves.

The regime in too many prisons is one of idleness, and locking up someone from such a background in idleness virtually guarantees re-offending. Instead there needs to be a full day's work every weekday in either the workshops or the education department or preferably a mixture of both.

Employment is key to reducing recidivism.

The best protection against recidivism is a job.

I think that we need to begin talking about what does it mean to create these safe spaces in our communities, to begin welcoming one another into our homes and into our communities when they're returning home from prison, people who are on the streets. We need to begin doing the work in our own communities of creating the kind of democracy that we would like to see on a larger scale.

We must build a movement for education, not incarceration. A movement for jobs, not jails. A movement that will end all forms of discrimination against people released from prison - discrimination that denies them basic human rights to work, shelter and food.

I think of my brother just out of prison again. He will have spent ten years of the last 30 in prison.

I was gladly cuffed, shackled, loaded into the caged bus and driven through the main gate of Bare Hill Correctional Facility for what I pray to God will be forever.

So what really works? Treatments in jail do some good, but it's mostly too late: finding a family and a job or just growing older make most prisoners eventually give up crime.

I am a firm believer that upon release, ex-offenders should be afforded a second chance to become productive citizens by providing rehabilitation and education that will help them join the workforce.

Yeah, I've gotten a few letters from prison.

I get a lot of calls from families and people who have served time and they say, 'Thank you, Sheriff. I hate the tents.' That's music to my ears.

My pop did a little time.

Military convicts and ordinary criminals if kept in prison will be useless. Therefore, it would be better for them to be sent to Cambodia and live among the [Khmer] people there, who would benefit from their teaching.