Stephen Breyer Quotes

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.

I put perople in prison for too long. I had no choice.

Criminal justice reformers prattle on about 'over-incarceration' in America when in fact our nation suffers from an under-incarceration problem.

Too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long, and for no truly good law enforcement reason.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

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

I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum.

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.

If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.

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.

When you talk about mandatory minimums, it created a lot of unfairness in our sentencing.

One of my priorities is criminal justice reform, and there is certainly bipartisan appetite for that. I think we need to eliminate the cash bail system. We need to eliminate mandatory minimums. We need sentencing reform. I think we need parole reform as well.

When we have people whose lives are being turned around in a negative way because they're incarcerated for either too long or for crimes that don't need incarceration, that's a moral issue for me.

People bring up Willie Horton or some other political bombshell in the past, but what they're not being intellectually honest about is if we do not work on early release, if we do not rehabilitate 95 percent of the people who go into the prison system and come out, far more innocent people are going to be harmed.

When we look at our justice system, we have this image of a balancing scale: truth and justice, right and wrong. But for years, our system has been lopsided, where it's not about truth and justice or balance. It's about being tough on crime, and sometimes that means you're putting the wrong person behind bars.

A lot of the problems we have in our criminal-justice system, you know, the problem of over-incarceration, the problem of prosecutorial abuse, the problem of just this sort of mass crop of people, of plea bargains, they all have to do with the system being overloaded. If crime was lower, many of the problems would go away.

The fact that more than 50 percent of Americans have an immediate family member either currently or formerly incarcerated tells you a lot about just how defining a feature of American culture incarceration has become.