David Lidington Quotes

A duty to the public must be to stop prisoners reoffending through successful rehabilitation.

There's definitely a way to fix the prison system. First of all, you gotta get a rehabilitation center in prisons, that every inmate must go through.

The regime in too many prisons is one of idleness, and locking up someone from such a background in idleness virtually guarantees re-offending. Instead there needs to be a full day's work every weekday in either the workshops or the education department or preferably a mixture of both.

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

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

Unfortunately, the elimination of incentives such as parole, good time credits and funding for college courses, means that fewer inmates participate in and excel in literacy, education, treatment and other development programs.

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.

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

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.

Think about how much it costs to incarcerate someone. Do we want them just sitting in prison, lifting weights, becoming violent and thinking about the next crime? Or do we want them having a little purpose in life and learning a skill?

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

Unless we address those that are leaving prisons, we can't begin to repair the damage of mass incarceration and make our communities whole and healthy once again.

Shouldn't one of the goals of prison be getting as many of the inmates as possible back out into the world to be responsible citizens? Aren't we just wasting generations of human potential by keeping over two million people behind bars?

Prisons are out of public sight, and most often out of mind. But the vast majority of prisoners will at some point leave jail and rejoin our communities, which is why what happens inside matters to us all.

I've been working in adult prisons and juvenile prisons for some time.

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.

The second time I went to jail, I was like, 'Okay, this is not the move.'

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

We lose our right to be surprised that California has the highest recidivism rate in the country if we refuse to hire folks who have taken responsibility for their crimes and have done their time.

I've worked in the prison system for five years, and most of those folks in prison didn't have a direction.

Dutch prisons are probably the most civilized you're going to find anywhere in the world.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

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

Incarcerating non-violent offenders in the same population as more dangerous criminals has the effect of inculcating the former into a culture of criminality common among the latter, making them more of a risk to public safety upon release than when they originally went in.