Criminal Justice System Quotes

I've laid out a platform that I think would begin to remedy some of the problems we have in the criminal justice system.

We cannot just say law and order. We have to say - we have to come forward with a plan that is going to divert people from the criminal justice system, deal with mandatory minimum sentences, which have put too many people away for too long for doing too little.

Unfortunately, race still determines too much, often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they're treated in the criminal justice system.

America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace.

I've written about illegal immigrants in the United States; I spent a year following migrant farm workers as they were harvesting. I've written about our criminal justice system, and how it treats the victims of crime. I've been working for years now on a book about prisons in America, and I've been going into prisons and traveling around the country and seeing what's going on.

The education justice movement and the prison justice movement have been operating separately in many places as though they're in silos. But the reality is we're not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we're wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system.

A subject I'm particularly passionate about is the criminal justice system and almost all of the policies that impact people's lives are determined on a local level.

After reading The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander's stunning work of scholarship, one gains the terrible realization that, for people of color, the American criminal justice system resembles the Soviet Union's gulag—the latter punished ideas, the former punishes a condition.

The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.

What really drives the battle against law enforcement and punishment is not a commitment to treatment, but the widely held view that, first, we are imprisoning too many people for merely possessing illegal drugs; second, drug and other criminal sentences are too long and harsh, and third, the criminal justice system is unjustly punishing young black men. These are among the great urban myths of our time.

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.

For too long, the victims of crime have been the forgotten persons of our criminal justice system.

All we want is justice for John Crawford and everyone responsible for John Crawford's death should be held responsible, the criminal justice system refused to hold those accountable so the civil system must.

These are young people who made mistakes that aren't that different than the mistakes I made and the mistakes that a lot of you guys made, we have a tendency sometimes to almost take for granted or think it's normal that so many young people end up in our criminal justice system. It's not normal. ... What is normal is teenagers doing stupid things.

One out of three black men are in the criminal justice system in some form. Their despair is beginning to resonate through the entire culture; that is why suburban children want rap music.

Race determines everything in the criminal justice system.

The criminal-justice system is, obviously, the sole source of racial tension in this country [USA] or the key institution to resolving the opportunity gap. It is a part of the broader set of challenges that we face in creating a more perfect union.

I went into journalism to learn the craft of writing and to get close to the world I wanted to write about - police and criminals, the criminal justice system.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

I therefore believe that our system does not have a word for failed trial, and that is where the American public does not realize that our criminal justice system sometimes makes mistakes.

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

To change criminal justice policy in any meaningful way means to propose changing a very longstanding system. It's not realistic to think you can do it overnight.

The criminal justice system, like any system designed by human beings, clearly has its flaws.

I think it's important to encourage young people to tell their own stories and to speak openly about their own experiences with the criminal justice system and the experiences of their family. We need to ensure that the classroom environment is a supportive one so that the shame and stigma can be dispelled.

I think the clearest manifestation for anyone who doubts that racism and classism exist in America, all one need do is take a real serious objective look at our criminal justice system.

Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become.

Specifically, the growing threat that sexual predators pose to our Nation's children and their families represents an area where our criminal justice system has failed the American people.

What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.

Once brave politicians and others explain the war on drugs' true cost, the American people will scream for a cease-fire. Bring the troops home, people will urge. Treat drugs as a health problem, not as a matter for the criminal justice system.

For years I supported capital punishment, but I have come to believe that our criminal justice system is incapable of adequately distinguishing between the innocent and guilty. It is reprehensible and immoral to gamble with life and death.

Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.

Given my experience, I believe there are three compelling reasons why the death penalty should be replaced. (1) The criminal justice system makes mistakes and the possibility of executing innocent people is both inherently wrong and morally reprehensible; (2) My personal experience and crime data show the death penalty does not reduce crime; and (3) The death penalty wastes precious resources that could be best used to fight crime and solve thousands of unsolved homicides languishing in filing cabinets in understaffed police departments across the state.

Dealing with a simple burglary can require 1000 process steps and 70 forms to be completed as a case goes through the Criminal Justice System. That can't be right.

People who know the economy is rigged in favor of big money, people who know that our middle class continues to decline and we have to go outside of establishment politics and economics, people who know that we need to reform a broken criminal justice system and we need comprehensive immigration reform.

My heart and passion has always been to reform the criminal justice system. I want to be a public servant, and I wanted to be a prosecutor because I felt it was the best way forward.

In the criminal justice system you see the worst people on their best behavior, unlike the civil system, where the best people behave at their worst.

When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

The civil justice system is a backup system when the criminal justice system fails.

The criminal justice system is accurately symbolized by a large sculpture that sits at the foot of the United States attorney's building: four metal circles that interlock. The wheels of justice, as it were, frozen in legal and social gridlock.

Given the realities of the U.S. criminal justice system, the prosecution may be unable to salvage this case. But just because that system fails victims on the regular doesn't mean we have to, too. French commentators are already calling for DSK to jump back into the country's presidential race and ride a wave of sympathy into office. Really, the stakes are greater than even that political prize. If we accept the narrative that only perfect women are raped, we risk sacrificing justice not only for this woman, but for victims of sexual assault everywhere. After all, nobody's perfect.

A large portion of American citizens, especially people of color, have lost confidence in our criminal justice system. Many have called for appointing special prosecutors when a police officer kills or injures a civilian. If you were elected president, would you publicly support special prosecutors in these cases and what is one other thing you would do to fix our broken justice system?

Our criminal justice system is fallible. We know it, even though we don't like to admit it. It is fallible despite the best efforts of most within it to do justice. And this fallibility is, at the end of the day, the most compelling, persuasive, and winning argument against a death penalty.

I don't want to exaggerate; having as many African American men as we've had in the criminal-justice system, and the amount of time it takes for the damage done by that to wash through our society and our communities, the disadvantages born out of kids being undiagnosed with mental-health problems early, or not getting the kind of exposure to reading and math when they're 4 or 5 or 6 years old, that carries a cost.

One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole - yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).

I started off as a young lawyer working against discrimination against African-American children in schools and in the criminal justice system. I worked to make sure that kids with disabilities could get a public education, something that I care very much about. I have worked with Latinos - one of my first jobs in politics was down in south Texas registering Latino citizens to be able to vote. So I have a deep devotion to making sure that an every American feels like he or she has a place in our country.

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.

Though the rampant racial injustices throughout the criminal justice system were offensive to me and to millions of other people, I've never drawn a tight circle around the black community to define the limits of my moral concern. But that narrative tends to get imposed on you, if you're an African-American activist.

The first thing we should be concerned about the BLM movement should be the issues that the Black Lives Matter movement is bringing forward. There's no fundamental platform being brought by activists in Oakland, Baltimore, or New Jersey. The main issues that you see, the commonality between activists all around the country, are trying to deal with the challenges in the criminal justice system, something that is very much central to my work. So my hope is that people stay focused on the urgency to create justice here at home.

For those who say that the war on drugs and the system of mass incarceration really isn't about race, I say there is no way we would allow the majority of young white men to be swept into the criminal justice system for minor drug offenses, branded criminals and felons, and then stripped of their basis civil and human rights while young black men who are engaged in the same activity trot off to college. That would never be accepted as the norm.

A symptomatic example of the way in which violence has saturated everyday life can be seen in the increased acceptance of criminalizing the behavior of young people in public schools. Behaviors that were normally handled by teachers, guidance counselors and school administrators are now dealt with by the police and the criminal justice system.