Barack Obama Quotes

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

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

At the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey, I worked as an Outreach and Re-entry Coordinator and an Assistant U.S. Attorney. I have seen the best of our law enforcement community and the commitment that they have made to the public's safety. But I've also seen too many examples of where our system falls desperately short.

We are a humane society, and one which believes that we have to help rehabilitate offenders so they turn away from crime.

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.

I represented many of these kids as they become young adults in the criminal justice system when I was a public defender. One way of reaching out is by the mind of experimentation.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

There are some really good experiments with the youth offending service, joining up youth offending teams with the youth justice board, and good local authority and primary care trusts working together.

The power to prevent violence is a power that no police force seems to have anywhere in the United States.

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

The vast majority of A.D.A.s put everything on the line to make sure justice is served. That's what I love about prosecutors and the New York police.

We must renew our efforts to keep our communities safe, from the dangers of terrorists from foreign lands and from common criminals here at home. Let no criminal believe that tough fiscal times will yield an open cell door and a ticket to freedom.

We improved the environment in which our children live, learn and play by decreasing crime and clamping down on abuse and violence in the home and on the streets.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

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

I mean that the function of the police is to solve problems that have law-enforcement consequences in a way that is based on a genuine partnership with the neighborhood in both the venting of the problem and the discussion of the solution.

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.

Criminals are punished, that others may be deterred.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

Court rules do not cause crime.

We are incapable of maintaining peace and order and to enforce the law with the resources we have.

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.