Keir Starmer Quotes

I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.

We spend an awful lot of money on the criminal justice system that could better be spent at the other end of the spectrum.

It makes a lot more sense for us to be investing in jobs and education rather than jails and incarceration.

Instead of investing our resources in locking people up, let's invest more of those resources in our fellow citizens so they don't end up in the system to begin with. And if they do, they can get back on their feet.

Let us reform our schools, and we shall find little reform needed in our prisons.

The essence to reducing violent crime in our society is to take these people [criminals] off the street.

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.

What makes a lot of sense is that, while people are incarcerated, give them the tools they need to be able to have a productive, lucrative living when they leave so they can provide for their families and break that cycle of recidivism.

We'll get way further if we educate people and not lock them up.

The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair.

Our society spends a lot of money on prison bars. For the sake of our kids, let's invest in monkey bars.

Sixty per cent of people entering prison today are illiterate.

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

Let's stop pretending we can arrest our way to safety and security. Despite all the fine work that policemen and women do, we have got to find other solutions to deter crime.

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?

As a society we're always so quick and able to spend money on lawyers for someone for incarceration, but we don't make the corresponding commitment to the preventative components of it.

I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them…

The draconian spirit that seeks to enhance penalties and to lower the age at which juveniles will be tries as adults, is part of the 'whole cloth' of three strikes. Our failure to address the depair of our inner-city youth is only delayed by our over-confidence in a stance that is 'tougher than thou.'

There's nothing conservative about allowing ourselves to become so inured to a 'tough on crime' frame of mind that we would abandon tested alternatives that can yield better outcomes.

I want to see prison numbers come down. We need better custody that cuts reoffending and crime. And we need to ensure judges, magistrates and the public have full confidence in the other penalties available.

Violent felons and people with mental health problems need to be rehabilitated.

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

Look, we'll have to confront the pathologies of poverty at some point. We can deal with them cheaply at the front end, in infancy. Or we can wait and jail a troubled adolescent at the tail end. To some extent, we face a choice between investing in preschools or in prisons.

It is better to support schools than jails.

We continue to work on policy to end discrimination against people with criminal records.