Jeff Smith Quotes

About 70% of those released from prison return within a few years, and the majority of those who return in some states do so in a matter of months because the challenges associated with mere survival on the outside are so immense.

Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.

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.

The subject of criminal rehabilitation was debated recently in City Hall. It's an appropriate place for this kind of discussion because the city has always employed so many ex-cons and future cons.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

I am proud of being in a U.S. federal prison and surviving it.

I spent my first three weeks there on a wing with 21 murderers. I met some very evil people there but also some men who'd had no upbringing, no chance in life.

Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone. Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill?

Innovation comes out of great human ingenuity and very personal passions.

Mothers are the necessity of invention.

Necessity, n. The mother of invention. Profit is the father.

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.

America is the land of the second chance - and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

I spent five years of my youth in prison - some very bad prisons.

I tell inmates all the time, 'Don't complain about your grind. Do your time.'

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.

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

What do people have against convicts? Is living together in the pen of freedom, where young people engage in mutual psychology, any more beautiful?

Necessity is the spur of genius.

Necessity is often the spur to genius.

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 had a lot of time and the first year I was in prison, I tried to get the party to stop the shooting, to stop the talk about the gun thing.

Hope, even more than necessity, is the mother of invention.

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.

The idea we have of prison is a scary place that also houses crazy people. And, to me, it was like, none of these guys were scary. They may have done things that are violent or scary, but these are not people that I feel nervous being around, and it feels like to me that we're wasting these men's lives in prison.