First of all, I didn't suggest that we should simply get rid of all prisons.
. . . the solution is not to toss youthful offenders into jail or prisons. We long ago recognized alcoholism to be a disease, and abondoned efforts to treat alcoholics simply by locking them up.
It's ridiculous that we continue to incarcerate anyone for using a substance that actually causes far less damage than alcohol. No one goes out looking for fights on marijuana. No one dies from marijuana intoxication. And no one should be jailed for possessing marijuana.
The criminal justice system is not the right place - or it shouldn't be the place of first resort to provide addiction or mental health services. It should happen elsewhere with no police and no judges and no juries and no jails.
I got a way to get through to kids. I try to take that and use that to my advantage. If we work on the kids right now, I'm telling you, they'll be making less mistakes, the jails will be gettin' less full. It's all about what we do with the kids.
Keeping them behind bars does little to reduce crime, but it does a lot to tear apart families, our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions.
By 1980, when I came out of prison, The Sun did a campaign to stop putting vice girls in prison. We've talked about it ever since and nothing has been done about it.
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.
We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.
People have started to see that 'smart on crime' rather than 'tough on crime' makes sense.
It is better to support schools than jails.
Yanukovych has changed everything in Ukrainian jails - real criminals have been released, while representatives of the middle class and politically rebellious free-minded people have filled the prisons.
We should not have people in prisons and jails who aren't a violent threat.
Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.
Incarceration and recidivism rates high? Providing people an incentive to stay out of jail while also providing them some level of economic security while they get back on their feet - both accomplished by a UBI - sounds like a great way to solve that problem.
We are already taking care of people from jail. Hundred and ten non-criminal women are already with us in Shantidhan (abode of peace).
And please, please, lets us put mental health back on the top of our national agenda, our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions.
