Alan K. Simpson Quotes

With a face like this, there aren't a lot of lawyers or priest roles coming my way. I've got a face that was meant for a mug shot, and that's what I've been doing for the past thirty years.

I went to jail at 16 for stealing tires off Cadillacs. When I got out I said, Never again.

When a young person is sent 'up the river,' we need to remember that all rivers can change course.

I went to prison; therefore, I've been rehabilitated, and now I want to get on with my life. I have paid for what I did, end of story.

We don't live in a world where, if you commit a crime, your life's over. We as a society believe in rehabilitation. We believe in second and third chances.

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

As the U.S. prison population has surged over the decades, the legal profession's distaste for former inmates has become more conspicuous. And it isn't only law. Medical schools often have committees to evaluate cases and mitigating factors but are generally reluctant to admit ex-inmates.

I would make the case that the vast majority of prisoners leave prison and go back into society. We share that society with them and what sort of people do we want them to be.

There are many things in my life that I wish I could take back. Many moments I would recast.

Fundamentally, as human beings, we're very, very alike and a lot more alike than we think, but we have a tendency to divide the world into them and us. In prison, when people commit a crime and we put them away, they definitely become "them." We don't want to deal with it because they have chosen to step out of society, so we're going to keep them out. Even if they serve their time, we're going to make sure that, for the rest of their lives, they're going to be branded. I don't know how to do it in a different way, but I think it clearly doesn't work.

In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, 'See this kid? He'll kill.'

I think of my brother just out of prison again. He will have spent ten years of the last 30 in prison.

There are moments in one's life where you look back and you say, 'Well, I wish I had done this differently.'

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.

As soon as I ended up being incarcerated, I said, you know, this is not the life for me.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

I'm sorry I didn't go to jail for six months, then I know you could come to see me anytime you wanted to.

Well I certainly have learned and I hope I'm moving on and certainly two years of prison was a terrible punishment.

Once you have a felony conviction on your record, one of the most difficult things to do is to break the cycle of recidivism.

So for you people who are filled with fear that I might someday be released: breathe easy, I don't see it happening.

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.

If I had to do my life over, I would change every single thing I have done.

The second time I went to jail, I was like, 'Okay, this is not the move.'

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

There are many things that, if I have to relive, maybe I will do it another way. But I would not like to look back and think what I have not been able to.