Carrie P. Meek Quotes

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

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.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

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.

If we have to build more prisons, it means we have failed.

If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.

Mandatory prison terms is easy to say, but where are we going to put people?

No penal or political system which multiplies the population of the prisons at the rate of 10 per cent every year will solve a problem which is growing to be more and more of a danger to the social and moral life of the nation.

[We have to make] a distinction between dangerous violent criminals and people who are engaged in non-violent criminal activities….Your taking somebody out of the economy, breaking up their families, and putting them in a place with hardened criminals. I think that it is pretty hard to argue that has been a positive long-term result.

The whole issue of corrections is something that came up a lot, no matter where we were. I think people would expect that would be a Milwaukee issue, but it's an issue across the state, and that ties to so many other things.

We should be extremely cautious about continuing to increase sentences as a routine response to concerns over crime.

The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

We've got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians.

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.

I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.

More prisons, more enforcement, effective death penalty.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

Too many Americans are going to too many prisons for far too long.

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.

We can agree that keeping serious criminals in prison is an effective means of preserving public safety, but we must also recognize that the axiom of 'putting people in jail and throwing away the key' does not apply to all offenders universally and can actually be counterproductive.

Almost one in three Americans has had some contact with the criminal justice system. When you reach that saturation point, people begin to understand, in a very visceral way, the difficulties of reentry.

Incarcerating non-violent offenders in the same population as more dangerous criminals has the effect of inculcating the former into a culture of criminality common among the latter, making them more of a risk to public safety upon release than when they originally went in.

Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars?

Everyone needs a place to live. Everyone needs a place to come home to every night. I don't understand why our society, our government, can think that you can lock a person away for months or years... and then release them back after they pay their debt without any support and expect it to be okay.