Mario Cuomo Quotes

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

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.

I think we need to rethink our ideas about what policing is and should be. I think we need to rethink our ideas about the criminal justice system as a whole, including the hysterically named corrections system. I mean, what's being corrected? Look, none of it's working.

We loathe mass incarceration. We loathe police brutality. But most of us have absolutely no idea how to address the critical flaws in our justice system.

Our criminal justice system is failing all of us. It is not keeping us safe. It is contributing to a vicious cycle of crime and punishment.

Years now, decades, of visiting my parents behind bars taught me hard lessons about how broken the criminal justice system is - about how devoid of compassion it is. It's not healing the harm that victims experience. It's not rehabilitating people. And in many ways, it's making us less safe.

When I travel and speak across the country, I often tell college students that we are making a significant mistake when we say to each other that this criminal justice of ours is broken. To say it's broken would be to suggest that it was well designed and had good intentions from the start.

I think our criminal justice system has two problems. We have systematic problems and we have people problems. So if the hearts of people are not about justice than any system you have won't work.

We need to notice and be aware of the injustices embedded in our criminal system.

In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn't be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.

Black and brown communities are significantly and disproportionately impacted by deficiencies in our criminal justice system.

I want to see changes in our criminal justice system.

We have to deal with the way that race influences our criminal justice system.

There's an awful lot about our criminal justice system that is dysfunctional. Everyone who sets foot in a criminal courtroom will see myriad ways the system is dysfunctional.

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.

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

I see no reason why big-shot crooks should go free while the poor ones go to jail.

The most malign of all these dangers today is disregard and disobedience of law. Crime is increasing. Confidence in rigid and speedy justice is decreasing.

Blacks - and critically. black elites - remain skeptical of the procedural fairness of the criminal justice system, while white elites, Democrats and Republicans alike, are more willing to embrace a “law and order” approach to criminal law enforcement.

Prisons are a growth industry in a country that has stopped building schools because we would rather not pay our property taxes. And we seem remarkably comfortable with a criminal-justice system that locks up and "disappears" people we fear or hold in contempt — with prisons as closets to hide our unmentionables and as factories for processing spare human parts until there is nothing left but waste.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

The justice system [in Mexico] is totally inoperative…. 2 percent of all crime is someone put in jail. How bad is that?

I believe that even if a criminal defendant has committed a heinous wrong, they should still be treated with respect from everyone in the criminal justice system, including prosecutors

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.