Criminal Justice Reform Quotes

Boston's justice system is in serious need of reform. Many of its policies and practices are antiquated, expensive, and don't really even make Boston safer.

The cure for the Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner tragedies is not education or exposure. It's the gospel.

It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.

For some people, their idea of getting tough is longer suspended sentences.

The drug war is causing crime. It is just chewing up young, Black men. And it is killing Newark.

If you don't educate people well, then you're going to have a lot of violent, angry young men and women. You can go around saying they're all so violent, just throw them in jail, this is an underclass, what can you do? You can create fear. The issue of violence is very suitable for a repressive society. Then you can have more legislation, more police, more laws to fight crime, when all you need to do is to encourage people in a different way.

It is always possible that occasional individuals may have overstepped the law and humanity in treatment of criminals and those charged with crime, and if so, they should be severely punished.

Dwayne Betts is the kind of man who should be receiving awards from the Connecticut bar. Instead, he hasn't been admitted.

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.

We have a serious problem with incarceration in this country. It's destroying families, it's destroying communities and we're the most incarcerated country in the world, and when you look deeper and look at the reasons we got to this place, we as a society made some choices politically and legislatively, culturally to deal with poverty, deal with mental illness in a certain way and that way usually involves using incarceration.

If you want a president who will make things better in the African-American community, you are looking at him. You take a look!

I think one of the things that I don't think people focus on is that there are some red states that have done some really innovative things when it comes to criminal justice reform, including on rehabilitation, reentry efforts. I think one of the things that we have seen in that regard is that you save money.

The criminal law is no use to decent people.

The worst an ex-con is likely to do if given the right to vote is vote for a Democrat.

One third of African American males are destined to be in prison sometime in their lifetime.

If you had a magic wand today, and you had one wish - to wipe out all the drug dealers, take them all off the streets and put them in jail, no trial, everybody who sold drugs would automatically be convicted. You know what's going to happen? There's going to be new ones. Why? Because the drug users are going to create them.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

I'd rather deal with Tipper than Bush. He's trying to kill everybody in jail.

Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights supports youth reentry projects because my father cared deeply about children and young people involved in the juvenile justice system, part of his focus while serving as attorney general.

We have one Black man as President; we have one million Black men in prison.

What was most important, for me, is that I could share what I experience as a young person - in particular, what impact incarceration and policing had on my life and my family's life.

Barack Obama's understanding of what the drug war had cost the country was meaningful. And very quietly in his second term, he and Eric Holder did make some adjustments in terms of the use of the Department of Justice, on the federal level. You saw ratcheting back of drug prohibition, and mass incarceration. You also saw, on the part of some certain states, a realization that they followed the war on drugs to a useless place, that they were only doing damage to communities, and bankrupting budgets with prison construction.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted . . . and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen.

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.