Chris Grayling Quotes

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.

In the long run, a flexible sentencing procedure which works to rehabilitate offenders offers the best hope in the majority of cases in the Federal courts.

I believe the public therefore expect the justice system to focus on rehabilitation to reduce the risk of subsequent offending - and the likelihood of them becoming a victim of crime.

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

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.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?

We want a state of things in which crime will not pay.

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

If we have to build more prisons, it means we have failed.

The purpose of the criminal justice system is both to rehabilitate and to punish. If we can rehabilitate somebody, that's a huge, huge win.

Circumstances of crimes vary. So do motives. And so do prospects for rehabilitation. The number of imponderables makes it impossible to sentence by formula and still sentence justly.

I think one of the keys to any crime-prevention program that's got to be developed is to focus on punishment - to let people know that there is a sanction and a punishment for hurting others.

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.

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

I would make the case that the vast majority of prisoners leave prison and go back into society. We share that society with them and what sort of people do we want them to be.

Criminals, people who commit crimes, usually society rejects these people. They are also part of our society. Give them some form of punishment to say they were wrong, but show them they are part of society and can change. Show them compassion.

If you put a woman in prison for four years when she's young and make her pay her time in a horrible place and she wants to come out and work, and become a mother and be a contributor to society and pay taxes and you never give her that chance. There is something un-Canadian about that.

There's a simple way to solve the crime problem: obey the law; punish those who do not.

All issues of crime are better addressed at the state level.

The subject of criminal rehabilitation was debated recently in City Hall. It's an appropriate place for this kind of discussion because the city has always employed so many ex-cons and future cons.

Without turning prison life into something more meaningful, prisoners are more likely to reoffend.

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.