Community-Based Solutions Quotes

I believe we are nearing a time when a combination of technology and radical thinking will make it possible for much more intensive and restrictive conditions to be applied in more creative and fundamental ways outside of prison.

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

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

I think transportation and corrections are not the first two areas that I would go looking for massive change.

What I can do is to go out and talk about the problems and solutions, make people aware of the scope of the problems, get them to become advocates for a turnaround, and convince them to develop an action plan, targeted to their community, to deal with young people. [They need to] find out what the kids want to do - dances, midnight-basketball leagues.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

In terms of closing Rikers, we have to close Rikers, but we have to ensure that we're not just taking - that we're not continuing to incarcerate the same level of people. It doesn't do us much good if we close Rikers and then take that same amount of people and just distribute them to be incarcerated elsewhere.

The status quo tough-on-crime policies of the '90s and 2000s are not working and are not popular. And it provides me with hope about the possibilities for San Francisco and this whole country in terms of moving away from our dependence on prisons and jails to solve social problems.

I support local solutions to illegal immigration as protected by the 10th amendment. I support making English the official language of all documents and contracts.

We’re not the nation’s jailers. We are not out there to punish. We are out there to learn.

We need to do a better job of working, again, with the communities, faith communities, business communities, as well as the police to try to deal with this problem.

We rarely have good alternatives to offer to prison - that's our default.

People have started to see that 'smart on crime' rather than 'tough on crime' makes sense.

When it comes to our public services, decentralisation means giving power back to those on the front line - our doctors, nurses, teachers and physiotherapists, and our locally elected officials.

It would be a good time to replace the drug war with something more constructive. The cure offered the drug war today has probably been more harmful and done more damage than the disease.

Fellow conservatives, particularly within the Republican Party, typically do a good job arguing against totalitarian, one-size-fits-all approaches to policy. What works for a family in New York City might not work in Jenison, Michigan, or Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But the other notion is, we also believe that those folks closest on the ground that we're holding accountable for the results can decide, and ought to evaluate which programs get results.

Governments do not have the answers - indeed, quite the reversal. A lot of times, they not only do not have the answers, but they themselves are the problem. If we are committed to helping our world's children, then we must begin to create solutions from the bottom up.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.