Juvenile Justice System Quotes

As a newspaper reporter, I covered and was around a fair number of crime scenes involving juvenile delinquents, and few things bothered me more than listening to their parents. Crying, ranting, proclaiming how great their children were despite being kicked out of school or previous run-ins with the law.

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.

Negro children are still sent to prison with adult criminals, and that they leave it half devil and half beast.

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.

I was in juvenile detention center, and I was in Rikers Island. And there was an anthology written by the inmates called 'The Pen,' and I - you know, I had a crush on a girl, and she left me when I was incarcerated. And I found this poem in this anthology that talked about having your heart broken and being incarcerated.

Locking minors away for decades doesn't solve anything.

Robert F. Kennedy Juvenile Justice Collaborative was formed in 2009 to improve federal youth reentry policy through advocacy, coalition building, and giving voice to youth who are directly impacted by the justice system.

Despite the fact that in America we incarcerate more juveniles for life terms than in any other country in the world, the truth is that the vast majority of youth offenders will one day be released. The question is simple and stark. Do we want to help them change or do we want to help them become even more violent and dangerous?

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.

Police arrested two kids yesterday, one was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other one off.

Once a week we go to juvenile hall and talk to boys there. Just go and spend a day in the juvenile courts.

Our criminal justice system has swallowed up too many people I love.

Our criminal justice system has swallowed up too many people I love. I am proud to join the ACLU in the fight to make mass incarceration a thing of the past.

I began going to juvenile prisons. And some of these kids face some very, very tough lives. How do they handle these lives? Do they even know that if their life is bad, that they're still OK? Do they know that? Do they know that someone is thinking the same way that they're thinking?

In my view, one of the major reasons that we have so many people in jail is that we have turned our backs on a lot young people.

The thing about youthful offenders is that no one seems to care about them. Most people don't like adolescents - even the good ones can be snarky and unpleasant. Combine the antipathy we feel toward the average teenager with the fear inspired by youth violence, and you have a population that no one wants to deal with.

In many large urban areas, the majority of working age African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. It is viewed as "normal" in ghetto communities to go to prison or jail.

Instead of schools being a pipeline to opportunity, schools are feeding our prisons.

In the state of Mississippi, Many Years Ago, a boy of 14 years got a taste of Southern law.

There are some really good experiments with the youth offending service, joining up youth offending teams with the youth justice board, and good local authority and primary care trusts working together.

When you have all these new police officers and resource officers coming into schools, what I'm worried is going to happen is we're going to increase the school-to-prison pipeline, which disproportionately affects students of color and lower social status.

We are among the handful of countries that has difficulty distinguishing juveniles from adults where crime is concerned. We are convinced that if a child commits an adult crime, that kid is magically transformed into an adult. Consequently, we try juveniles as adults.

But there's a reason that we have different laws for juveniles than we do for adults. And it's because kids are not liable for the things they do in the way that adults are, because we think that kids are different.

People are swept into the criminal justice system - particularly in poor communities of color - at very early ages... typically for fairly minor, nonviolent crimes.

I actually worked with an organization called Drama Club that works with incarcerated teens and youth in a detention center and in Rikers Island, which a lot of people don't know that teens have been incarcerated in Rikers Island.