Janet Reno Quotes

Studies have shown that inmate participation in education, vocational and job training, prison work skills development, drug abuse, mental health and other treatment programs, all reduce recidivism, significantly.

We also need people like social workers, volunteers, the Christian Industrial League, drug treatment programs to make sure you are getting them a job. That's what you have to do. Otherwise, we just keep stepping around these things.

The war on drugs is a war on our own families …. We have to move from a system that punishes to a system that treats.

The criminal justice system is not the right place - or it shouldn't be the place of first resort to provide addiction or mental health services. It should happen elsewhere with no police and no judges and no juries and no jails.

Violent felons and people with mental health problems need to be rehabilitated.

Since the late 1970's, the main focus of prisons has been punishment, not rehabilitation. It's hard to believe, but you would be hard-pressed to find a meaningful violence-prevention class in a federal or state penitentiary. And 'we the people' are footing the bill to keep these folks imprisoned. It costs on average $46,000 a year to keep an adult incarcerated in California and about the same for New York State.

We can't allow domestic violence to become a campaign issue.

'Getting smart on crime' does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

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

As a society we're always so quick and able to spend money on lawyers for someone for incarceration, but we don't make the corresponding commitment to the preventative components of it.

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

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

The addict is under compulsion not capable of management without outside help.... If addicts can be punished for their addiction, then the insane can also be punished for their insanity. Each has a disease and each must be treated as a sick person.

To become a narcotic addict is an anti-social act and the foundation of countermeasures against addiction is to treat and rehabilitate addicts.

People who need [drug abuse] treatment have got to get it. You don't have to be a humanitarian to believe addicts need treatment. The public is threatened every time a drug addict is told to come back next week.

Heroin: Try it once … Hooked for life.

There's nothing conservative about allowing ourselves to become so inured to a 'tough on crime' frame of mind that we would abandon tested alternatives that can yield better outcomes.

People end up on the street for many different reasons - leaving care or hospital, problems with debt, unemployment, mental health, family breakup - and so the help they need is varied, too.

Instead of investing our resources in locking people up, let's invest more of those resources in our fellow citizens so they don't end up in the system to begin with. And if they do, they can get back on their feet.

The Protect America's Schools Act is not the only answer, but it is a positive step forward in preventing tragedies.

Prison officers face enormous pressure. The levels of violence inside our prisons are too high.

In 1994, the bipartisan Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was signed into law to prevent and combat domestic violence.

We have been embarked on what I would call a proactive strategy that looks at our gun violence as a public health crisis, which is what it is. That means we look at the root causes of the violence.

We still have a strong commitment to our original mission, which is to protect and assist people who are suffering from the impact of violence, but the violence has changed its character, format, and pattern so that we are now responding year after year.

A New Way of Life is a safe house that women can come to after they're released from prison in South Los Angeles. It's a place for women to detox the trauma, the torture of incarceration, be welcomed and embraced and live and begin their new path to - if it's recovery or receiving mental health services, go back to school, get their children back.