Bill Owens Quotes

No one wants dangerous criminals in our communities.

I think we will be safer when we can concentrate law enforcement and criminal justice resources and energies on those individuals who truly need, for the safety of society... to be incarcerated.

The people of Britain want a Home Secretary who will give them back their streets. They want a Home Secretary who will speak up for the victim, not the criminal.

Society questions the police and their methods, and the police say, Do you want the criminals off the street or not?

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

It is time to put more cops on the beat and remove our most violent repeat offenders from our neighborhood streets.

The people deemed too dangerous to release therefore become the very people released with no conditions and no supervision.

The essence to reducing violent crime in our society is to take these people [criminals] off the street.

Bad people should be incarcerated.

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.

We are much safer in the United States, but not yet safe.

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.

It is a huge asset to law and order that serious or persistent criminals should be taken out of the society on which they prey. It makes life safer for the law-abiding and on the whole prisons are pretty good at containing those who have been committed to them.

The police should be focused on policing criminal activity, and that's sort of the beginning, the middle and the end of it for me.

As a law-enforcement official, as a politician, you are always going to have in the back of your mind the fear that someone you release will end up committing another crime, potentially a serious crime, during a period when they otherwise would have been incarcerated.

I want to bear down on violent crime, in all its aspects from terrorism to sexual offences but definitely knife and gun crime, particularly as it affects young people.

Too often, we see violent criminals return to the streets they have previously terrorized, only to commit more violent crimes.

Too many communities are living in fear as violent crime rises. So we need to reform our justice system to keep our streets safe and protect the law-abiding majority. That means putting an end to soft sentences and punishing offenders by keeping them behind bars so that the public can be protected and the offenders can be rehabilitated.

Let us be clear. Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists, and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice.

Law and order is a social service. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from Social Security benefits to law and order - as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime was matched by practice.

It is high time for society to stop worrying about the criminal, and to let the criminal start worrying about society. And by "society" I mean you.

We're so so interested in protecting criminals and people that want to do us harm and I think we have to go back to a little more old fashioned method of thinking, if that makes sense.

We must continue to ensure law enforcement has the necessary tools to combat terrorism here at home. We must also work with our allies and provide our military with the weapons and protective gear they need to defeat terrorism abroad.

We've got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians.

You can't ever win the war on crime, or the war on terror. You can't repeal human nature.