David von Drehle Quotes

I believe the public therefore expect the justice system to focus on rehabilitation to reduce the risk of subsequent offending - and the likelihood of them becoming a victim of crime.

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.

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.

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.

A duty to the public must be to stop prisoners reoffending through successful rehabilitation.

Victims of crime and the wider community deserve a grown-up debate on our criminal justice system and how we can make it work - for those within it and for those it protects.

There's nothing conservative about allowing ourselves to become so inured to a 'tough on crime' frame of mind that we would abandon tested alternatives that can yield better outcomes.

Instead of investing our resources in locking people up, let's invest more of those resources in our fellow citizens so they don't end up in the system to begin with. And if they do, they can get back on their feet.

I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population.

What makes a lot of sense is that, while people are incarcerated, give them the tools they need to be able to have a productive, lucrative living when they leave so they can provide for their families and break that cycle of recidivism.

Trying to explain the First Step Act in prison reform in a tweet or Facebook post is not easy.

No one wants dangerous criminals in our communities.

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

We are a humane society, and one which believes that we have to help rehabilitate offenders so they turn away from crime.

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

Too often, we see violent criminals return to the streets they have previously terrorized, only to commit more violent crimes.

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

Too many communities are living in fear as violent crime rises. So we need to reform our justice system to keep our streets safe and protect the law-abiding majority. That means putting an end to soft sentences and punishing offenders by keeping them behind bars so that the public can be protected and the offenders can be rehabilitated.

As I have pointed out time and again, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to send little kids to school than it is to let them grow up into young thugs who have to be sent to prison, not to mention the savings in the wear and tear on the nerves, property, and safety of the rest of the citizenry.

Let us be clear. Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists, and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice.

You know, in our country lately we're more interested in protecting the criminals than we are in making sure that we're strong and powerful and know what we're doing.

We must stand our ground to ensure that our laws reduce violence and take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent.

We need to have more second chance programs. I'm glad that we're ending private prisons in the federal system; I want to see them ended in the state system.

I feel like it had an impact, in that it started the attention that has been paid to what was happening. It started to get us into this whole conversation about prison reform, the whole bipartisan dialogue that's been happening over the past five, six years about this, where you have a Van Jones and a Newt Gingrich, and you have the Rick Perrys and so forth getting up and talking about the need to reform.

In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.