Hillary Clinton Quotes

I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum.

I want to see changes in our criminal justice system.

It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

In January 2013, I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative.

I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.

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

Victims of crime and the wider community deserve a grown-up debate on our criminal justice system and how we can make it work - for those within it and for those it protects.

I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population.

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.

I have, ever since the first day of my campaign, called for criminal justice reform.

You have an electorate [in America] that wants to see people who are not tough on crime.

I agree with President Obama and Attorney General Holder that we need to reform our criminal sentencing laws.

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 think one of the things that I don't think people focus on is that there are some red states that have done some really innovative things when it comes to criminal justice reform, including on rehabilitation, reentry efforts. I think one of the things that we have seen in that regard is that you save money.

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

More prisons, more enforcement, effective death penalty.

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

Mandatory prison terms is easy to say, but where are we going to put people?

But passing by all other considerations, and contemplating merely the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them.

The United States imprisons many non-violent offenders who could instead be required to pay fines, perform community service, and make restitution to their victims… Maintaining our vast network of prisons consumes resources that could be better spent on education and other crime prevention efforts... Rather than reforming offenders, prison too often degrades and dehumanizes prisoners, making the task of rehabilitation and reentry into society even more difficult.

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

We spend $94,000 per prisoner [per year]. There is a tension between punishment and making people’s lives better and I don’t actually think that we have done the second part well. We put people in prison and expect them to come out

Every first year law student learns that sentencing has four goals: retribution, incapicitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

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.

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.