Tony Rock Quotes

I was definitely an at-risk kid growing up.

It stands to reason that unloved and unwanted children are going to get into crime.

I lived in Complexo do Alemao until I was 12, dealt with domestic violence in my childhood and faced difficulties in life.

In the cases that come before the Department of Justice involving a wide range of unlawful activities, we see repeated evidence of family and community failures.

I had a bad background just growing up as a child.

People who end up in our prisons tend to come from the most difficult backgrounds. They did not have the parental support as they grew up, as many of us enjoyed, and they struggle when they leave prison.

The gang culture - tragically - has for some young people become the only source of stability in their lives.

Gang members have invariably grown up in broken, chaotic homes, often experiencing domestic violence; they have truanted from school and many have been formally excluded; and they live in neighbourhoods where worklessness, addiction and crime are rife.

I go to correctional facilities and talk to kids there. They have little kids in there who are, like, 12 years old, stealing cars and stuff like that.

An alcoholic father, poverty, my own juvenile diabetes, the limited English my parents spoke - although my mother has become completely bilingual since. All these things intrude on what most people think of as happiness.

I had a very difficult upbringing.

Growing up, we didn't have anything. My mum wasn't well, so I was in three care homes then foster homes before me and my little brother went back to her. I was passed from pillar to post.

More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.

Kids are wandering around the streets today that will become tomorrow's criminals that were yesterday's heroes.

I came from a very poor background. I came from children's homes; I came from a violent family, and against all the odds, I succeeded.

I lived in a bad neighborhood. I knew so many things a boy shouldn't know. I did so many things a boy shouldn't do.

I grew up in a bookless house with a father and brother who have spent most of their lives in prison, psychiatric hospitals, or living rough, and a mother who has spent her life slaving and scrimping to pay the bills, living a nervous and troubled life.

I was 17 and living on the streets. I had the education of technically an eighth-grader, but in reality, I had never had a formal education.

I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.

I didn't have much of a childhood, but that's O.K. I have a livelihood.

No kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang; he's always fleeing something. He's not being pulled; he's being pushed by the circumstances in which he finds himself.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

It was very difficult when I was young because there are problems with violence, gangs, guns, drugs - a criminal life. I had friends that choose a criminal life. Some of them are in prison, and some of them are dead. They chose the bad way.

If a kid is born into a tough situation with no means of dealing with it, you end up with kids who are mentally ill and have no way of reaching out.

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.