Chris Grayling Quotes

We're recycling very dangerous criminals over and over again.

There is one stark fact facing us: three quarters of all crime that results in a caution or sentence happens because of reoffending. We must be fearless in dealing with this.

Too often, we see violent criminals return to the streets they have previously terrorized, only to commit more violent crimes.

Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration …

No penal or political system which multiplies the population of the prisons at the rate of 10 per cent every year will solve a problem which is growing to be more and more of a danger to the social and moral life of the nation.

There is little evidence that the length of a sentence, as opposed to its certainty, has significant deterrent effects. If we cut sentences in half across the board, there is no reason to believe we’d see an appreciable rise in crime, and over time we would most likely see a large drop in the prison population.

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

We make no apology for people who should be in prison being in prison.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

I'm not in favor of the death penalty. But I'm in favor of locking these people away in maximum security units where they can never get out. They can never escape. They can never be paroled. Lock the bad ones away. But you gotta rethink everybody else.

More prisons, more enforcement, effective death penalty.

The purpose of punishment is fulfilled, crime is repressed by penalties of just, not tormenting, severity, its repetition is prevented, and hope is given for the reformation of the criminal.

It is a huge asset to law and order that serious or persistent criminals should be taken out of the society on which they prey. It makes life safer for the law-abiding and on the whole prisons are pretty good at containing those who have been committed to them.

Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves.

Every day, lax sentencing costs lives.

Unfortunately, if the man who leaves the prison gates is just as likely or - as is sometimes grievously the case - more likely to offend as he was when he entered them, then we fail not only the individual but public safety as well.

After six prison commitments, at the end of those, I was more broken than when I went into the system.

Nothing will deter crime but the certainty of punishment.

I think that far too often we let those who commit crimes in our society off far too lightly.

We should be extremely cautious about continuing to increase sentences as a routine response to concerns over crime.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

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.

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.

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.