Tahar Rahim Quotes

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

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.

As soon as I ended up being incarcerated, I said, you know, this is not the life for me.

I remember the people I knew in prison; I was very fortunate to know them - they came from 1910, 1920, 1930.

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.

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

It would be like the films I've seen where wardens would decide to be in a jail cell for a week, to get a sense of what it would be like to be a prisoner.

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.

Why would anyone expect Tyson to come out smarter? He went to prison for four years, not Princeton.

When you're in prison, the progress of the outside world doesn't necessarily translate inside prison walls. You don't have any rights; it just doesn't progress along the same timeline.

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

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

I don't even think jail helps Gucci Mane. It clearly doesn't.

I've never been incarcerated; I don't deal with these things on a day-to-day basis in my own personal life, but I have family members that do. I have friends that do. I have people in the city that I live in, Philadelphia, that are dealing with this on a daily basis.

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.

People bring up Willie Horton or some other political bombshell in the past, but what they're not being intellectually honest about is if we do not work on early release, if we do not rehabilitate 95 percent of the people who go into the prison system and come out, far more innocent people are going to be harmed.

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'm involved in the work around prison rights in general.

One out of 100 citizens of the U.S. is going to prison, and it's not that the system is making criminals, it's that it's making criminals better criminals. We're breeding them like rats and it has to change.

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

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

The way to reform has always led through prison.

Prisons are universities of the opposition.

I grew up in Huntsville, which is a main prison town. It's crazy. The conditions are so bad in prison, often, for the inmates.

The first visit I made to Australia was in 1996 when I was the prisons' minister and was looking at other countries' penal systems.