Criminal Justice Policy Quotes

A lot can be debated about criminal justice and its delivery system.

Over the last few years a lot of people have become aware of the inequities in the criminal justice system, right now, with our overall crime rate and incarceration rate both falling, we're at a moment when some good people in both parties, Republicans and Democrats and folks all across the country, are coming up with ideas to make the system work smarter and better.

I feel like it had an impact, in that it started the attention that has been paid to what was happening. It started to get us into this whole conversation about prison reform, the whole bipartisan dialogue that's been happening over the past five, six years about this, where you have a Van Jones and a Newt Gingrich, and you have the Rick Perrys and so forth getting up and talking about the need to reform.

I don't really retain much from the first couple semesters of my criminal justice studies.

The Democratic Party was always there on crime, but in the past we let the ideologues on the left dominate. The Republicans may still let the ideologues on the right dominate.

I want to see prison numbers come down. We need better custody that cuts reoffending and crime. And we need to ensure judges, magistrates and the public have full confidence in the other penalties available.

Changes in court decisions [on defendants' rights] ... have about the same effect on the crime rate as an aspirin would have on a tumor of the brain.

Mandatory minimum sentences give no discretion to judges about the amount of time that the person should receive once a guilty verdict is rendered. Harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses were passed by Congress in the 1980s as part of the war on drugs and the "get tough" movement, sentences that have helped to fuel our nation's prison boom and have also greatly aggravated racial disparities, particularly in the application of mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine.

The politics of crime is not about a party's record or a candidate's proposals, but about perceived character and values.

I think maybe there's a political reason why Hillary Clinton can't say it, but I really don't believe - in New York City, stop-and-frisk, we had 2,200 murders, and stop-and-frisk brought it down to 500 murders.

I'm very proud to have joined with conservatives in both the Senate and the House to reform how we target bad guys.

I want to be the Tough Justice Secretary.

Pardoning the Bad, is injuring the Good.

Most criminologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the United States have had relatively little to do with each other.