Social Intervention Quotes

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.

The state is now more involved than it ever has been in the raising of children. And children are now more neglected, more abused and more mistreated than they have been in our time. This is not a coincidence. This is not a coincidence. And with all due respect, I am here to tell you it does not take a village to raise a child. It takes a family to raise a child.

Piecemeal social engineering resembles physical engineering in regarding the ends as beyond the province of technology.

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.... The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

It makes sense for social scientists to become more involved in policy because many of society's most challenging problems are, in essence, behavioral.

The claim of the State Socialists, however, that this right would not be exercised in matters pertaining to the individual in the more intimate and private relations of his life is not borne out by the history of governments.

Anyone who knows gangs knows that lawmakers cannot conceive of a law that would lead a hard-core gang member to 'think twice.'

What we do best is we target the young men and women who are on the fringe. They could go either way. Maybe they have been in trouble before, but not serious trouble. ... We cherry-pick them and circumvent them away from the gang members and drug dealers ... (and encourage) them to hang out with us and become a Guardian Angel.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they'll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

Why cannot some of the money the government spends be used to take the children and youths who will become criminals, and educate them and put them into suitable environments so that they will become normal people?

In Chicago in 2000, the Cure Violence health approach saw a 67 percent decline in shootings and killings, which soon replicated to 70 communities nationwide with multiple independent evaluations from world-renowned institutions, such as the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

If you give the government the right to determine the consumption of the human body, to determine whether one should smoke or not smoke, drink or not drink, there is no good reply you can give to people who say, More important than the body is the mind and the soul, and man hurts himself much more by reading bad books, by listening to bad music and looking at bad movies. Therefore it is the duty of the government to prevent people from committing those faults. And, as you know, for many hundreds of years governments and authorities velieved that it was their duty.

You can't kill bad guys all day long because others will take their place.

Social science has been established not to set policy but to measure its results.

What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.

In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene.

Knife crime isn't an issue that's going to go away just because of repression and police action. Of course we need to support the forces, but it's linked to prevention, and prevention often comes through education.

I represented many of these kids as they become young adults in the criminal justice system when I was a public defender. One way of reaching out is by the mind of experimentation.

I remember my father checking on a mountain kid who hadn't been coming to school. My father had this beautiful Harris tweed overcoat. He came back with a knife cut all down one side. The parents had told him it was none of his business why their son wasn't going to school.

The task of dealing comprehensively with gangs belongs to the city, not to law enforcement.

If there is a moment when it is possible to intervene in the chaotic life of a homeless person, it is when they turn up as an NHS patient.

So complex are all the ingredients that cause gang membership that it seems virtually impossible to isolate one solution that can address them all and thereby manufacture a hope for the future upon which these kids can rely.

One of the problems of our society is that we spend too much time thinking about punishment and not enough about prevention.