Crime Policy Quotes

When it comes to public safety, I listen to police chiefs and cops, not to a cable-news station.

Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.

Once upon a time, Bill Clinton was widely perceived as an ally and advocate for the needs of black people. However, it is the Clinton administration's Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act that set the stage for the massive racial injustice we struggle with in law enforcement today.

Already this war on gangs in California is taking money from universities to build prisons, and the universities have some clout.

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

Drugs. If they did not exist our governors would have invented them in order to prohibit them and so make much of the population vulnerable to arrest, imprisonment, seizure of property, and so on.

Given the devastation that crime can visit on families and communities, I will err on being a little too tough on crime than being too soft on crime.

We have decriminalized Wall Street malfeasance.

Any politician who wants to eliminate parole just doesn’t understand law enforcement.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

Even without mandatory sentences, judges are still capable of levying tough penalties for serious offenses - and just as in states like Texas that have 'tough on crime' reputations, this can be done without jeopardizing public safety.

The political elite prefers to see criminals as victims in need of therapy and TLC.

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.

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

The Republican Party - that was the end of the Republican Party. What Pete Wilson did with the xenophobia and the negative attitude, all this sort of anti-crime backlash.

It's tough on somebody who is a elected official to talk sense about crime

When we look at our justice system, we have this image of a balancing scale: truth and justice, right and wrong. But for years, our system has been lopsided, where it's not about truth and justice or balance. It's about being tough on crime, and sometimes that means you're putting the wrong person behind bars.

The notion that we should take away educational programs in prisons in order to be tough on crime makes no sense.

The majority of our criminals that we lock up are non-violent offenders.

There is no doubt that cross border crime and illicit trade harm individuals and communities and pose challenges to governments, including the United States. But the panicked discourse and frenzied law enforcement policies that define Washington’s current approach are an alarmist reaction.

No politician after the Nixon-Agnew years would say, 'I was against the death penalty,' because they replaced 'soft on communism' with 'soft on crime.' You just see the horror of this thing.

The draconian spirit that seeks to enhance penalties and to lower the age at which juveniles will be tries as adults, is part of the 'whole cloth' of three strikes. Our failure to address the depair of our inner-city youth is only delayed by our over-confidence in a stance that is 'tougher than thou.'

Certainly, I don't think I can ever be accused of being soft on crime.

It takes a lot of nerve to bang your fist and demand tougher juvenile gun laws while doing nothing to enforce the ones that already exist. I must point out that doubling the size of the criminal code will not matter if the Clinton-Gore administration refuses to vigorously enforce these laws.

We waste a lot of time and law enforcement going after these guys that are smoking marijuana.