Clarence Darrow Quotes

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

We rarely have good alternatives to offer to prison - that's our default.

I want to see changes in our criminal justice system.

Our criminal justice system has swallowed up too many people I love. I am proud to join the ACLU in the fight to make mass incarceration a thing of the past.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

Our criminal justice system has swallowed up too many people I love.

A subject I'm particularly passionate about is the criminal justice system and almost all of the policies that impact people's lives are determined on a local level.

For some people, their idea of getting tough is longer suspended sentences.

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

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

We need criminal justice reform. You have heard people talk about that all over the country. I was able to work on that specific issue at home.

What we're doing in San Francisco and what we're doing with other criminal justice partners across the state and across the country is anything but indiscriminate. We are being careful. We are being focused and surgical in our efforts to decrease the jail population.

Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.

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.

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.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

Unless we maintain correctional institutions of such character that they create respect for law and government instead of breeding resentment and a desire for revenge, we are meeting lawlessness with stupidity and making a travesty of justice.

Men commit murder and all sorts of mayhem, in a few years they're back on the streets. Highway robbery and white collar crime, and they laugh at the system they beat.

Prisons do not disappear problems, they disappear human beings.

President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted . . . 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.