J. C. Watts Quotes

Eighty-two percent of prisoners in the United States are high-school dropouts. A high-school dropout between the ages of 30 and 34 is two-thirds more likely to be in jail, or to have been in jail, or to be dead.

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.

The United States makes up 5 percent of the world’s population yet has 25% of its prison population.

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.'

Kids who are the victims of broken families are more likely to end up in poverty, rehab, or jail. I'm a Republican, but I respect President Obama for setting the right example and addressing this problem.

How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.

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

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

We haven't had crime writers, and for a long time in the Republic, we didn't seem to have a crime problem as such.

Labour is the party of law and order in Britain today. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

In the city, a lot of crime happens, a lot of violence happens from time to time.

Many who resort to crime ultimately can't read or write.

There are a lot of stats and a strong correlation between dropout rates and crime as well as poverty.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

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.

Everybody in Detroit knows somebody who is in prison…. In Detroit, most of us are one incident from being locked up.

If you allow young folk to be abominably brought up and their characters corrupted little by little, from childhood; and if then you punish them as grown-ups for committing the crimes to which their training has consistently inclined them, what else is this, I ask, but first making thieves and then punishing them for it?

By the 1980s divorce declined among the more educated portions of the populace, while rates among the less educated continued to rise… the more educated and more well-to-do were more likely to wed. Given the family role as an incubator of human capital, such trends have had important spillover effects on inequality.

Arresting people is not going to lower the crime rate

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.

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.

In the decades since my youth, I've witnessed the explosion of fatherless families and an exponential increase in illiteracy and crime.

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.

I really believe, in my heart and soul, that if we would rebuild and strengthen the family structure in the country, you'd start to really deal with a number of the most difficult problems we're having in the country today, in poverty, education, and in crime, but we've broken the family structure up.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail.