Criminal Stigma Quotes

I'm not a criminal but I've been fingerprinted like a criminal.

Industrial hemp is a very useful plant. I challenged the attorney general to get rid of the criminal stigma associated with hemp so we can look at it in terms of how it might be useful.

To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace.

There's certain countries that you can't get in if you've got a criminal background record. There's certain jobs in the States that you can't get because you've got a criminal background record. That follows you the rest of your life... and that's something you have to deal with the rest of your life.

Perhaps there should be a box on the census form that says, 'I'm a criminal.' Everyone who has ever committed a crime would be required to check it. If everyone were forced to acknowledge their own criminality, maybe we, as a nation, would second-guess our apparent zeal for denying full citizenship to those branded felons.

The U.S. is supposed to be a nation of second chances, but for the 70 million Americans with a criminal record, we're not doing such a great job. Even among those whose crimes were nonviolent and committed long ago, too many still bear a scarlet letter.

We continue to work on policy to end discrimination against people with criminal records.

It's dangerous to write people off just because they've been arrested.

And, while it was regarded as pretty good evidence of criminality to be living in a slum, for some reason owning a whole street of them merely got you invited to the very best social occasions.

I have too great a soul to die like a criminal.

Where I come from, once word gets out that you've cooperated with the police, that only makes you a bigger target of criminal violence. That is a dark reality in so many neighborhoods like mine across America. I'm not saying its right, but it's reality.

Exacerbating the problem of mass incarceration is that, even after someone is released from prison, the stigma of a misdemeanor or felony conviction makes finding gainful employment difficult, if not impossible.

Public housing officials are free to discriminate against you on the basis of criminal records, including arrest records. And so, you know, what you find is that even for these extremely minor offenses, people find themselves trapped in a permanent second-class status and struggling to survive.

One thing I have learned in institutions is not to press hard on the fact that their inmates are, like the rest of mankind, sinners; for they, like many others, are liable to confuse the generic term "sinner" with the specific term "criminal." Most of us are so accustomed to admit that we have fallen short of grace and are "miserable offenders," in view of our possibilities and opportunities, that we do not resent being called "sinners"; but not so with our congregation.

It's not crime that makes us more punitive in the United States. It's the way we respond to crime and how we view those people who have been labeled criminals.

Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.

I got caught back up in the underworld because the upperworld really doesn't have a place for people with criminal histories.