Top 100 Quotes About Criminal Justice
#1. 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.
Michelle Alexander
#2. 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.
Edna Buchanan
#3. Once I discovered the theater at Santa Clara and once I got into the theater program, I never got into specific criminal justice studies.
Michael Trucco
#4. 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.
Kamala Harris
#5. 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.
Marilyn Mosby
#6. Yes, for my undergrad I majored in Criminal Justice and minored in Political Science and English.
Matthew McGrory
#7. Besides taking jobs from American workers, illegal immigration creates huge economic burdens on our health care system, our education system, our criminal justice system, our environment, our infrastructure and our public safety.
Jan C. Ting
#8. 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)
Michelle Alexander
#9. Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control, a system in which over 50% of young African-American kids are unemployed, it is estimated that a black baby born today has a one in four chance of ending up in the criminal justice system.
Bernie Sanders
#10. We cannot eradicate global drug markets, but we can certainly regulate them as we have done with alcohol and tobacco markets. Drug abuse, alcoholism and tobacco should be treated as public health problems, not criminal justice issues.
Otto Perez Molina
#11. Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.
Kamala Harris
#12. As a former attorney general. I have the greatest respect for the criminal justice system. But it is not good at intelligence gathering.
Kelly Ayotte
#13. The Indian criminal justice system was a market like garbage, Abdul now understood. Innocence and guilt could be bought and sold like a kilo of polyurethane bags.
Katherine Boo
#14. Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.
Werner Herzog
#15. And although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it's been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior - behavior too often celebrated in black culture.
Jason L. Riley
#16. Further, more African Americans today are under criminal justice supervision - either in prison, on parole or probation - than were enslaved 10 years before the Civil War (Alexander 2012
Merrill Singer
#17. Congressman Ryan is a strong advocate for greater mindfulness in health care as well as in other important areas such as education, the military, and criminal justice. In his book, he makes a very strong case for why we need greater mindfulness in these and other areas of our society.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#18. 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.
Barack Obama
#19. 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.
Larry Elder
#20. The whole future of America's black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.
Randall Robinson
#21. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#22. 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.
James Frey
#23. The criminal justice system, like any system designed by human beings, clearly has its flaws.
Ben Whishaw
#24. I'm from here, born and raised, and I'm a criminal justice major.
Jamie McGuire
#25. 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.
Michael Wright
#26. Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.
Michel Foucault
#27. The American people do not want people thumbing their nose at the law. It undercuts the very fabric of our society and the system of civil justice and of criminal justice as well.
Ernest Istook
#28. "Criminal justice" was a term she found more apt than it was meant to be.
Barbara Neely
#29. For too long, the victims of crime have been the forgotten persons of our criminal justice system.
Ronald Reagan
#30. I think the federal government should be doing only what the Constitution says it should be. We don't have authority under the federal Constitution to have a big federal criminal justice system.
Paul Broun
#31. The key thing is to ensure that we give the criminal-justice system the tools it needs, so that women's rights are turned into reality. It is not enough to say domestic violence is a crime ?- in order for the laws to be successful, lawyers and courts must have the necessary means to prosecute it.
Jon Kyl
#32. We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice. Now we must add a new fight - the fight for electoral justice.
Barbara Boxer
#33. The civil justice system is a backup system when the criminal justice system fails.
Ralph Nader
#34. It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.
Edmund Burke
#36. Our constitutionally-based criminal justice system places a high value on protecting the innocent. Among its central tenets is the idea that it is better to let a guilty person go free than to convict someone without evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.
Robert Shapiro
#37. It is apparent, if you go back through our history, that the grand juries of the criminal justice system do not value black lives.
William Lacy Clay Jr.
#38. The United States has held out against taking part in any of the world consensus that there should be a court of human rights or that there should be an international court of criminal justice.
Roger Waters
#39. States and counties routinely bear the costs associated with incarcerating undocumented criminal aliens once they enter the criminal justice system.
Michael Dean Crapo
#40. Race determines everything in the criminal justice system
Mark Geragos
#41. The criminal justice system should have the authority to determine the immigration status of all criminals, regardless of race or ethnicity, and report illegal immigrants who commit crimes to federal authorities.
Susana Martinez
#42. We are the in midst of a bipartisan moment as it relates to criminal justice reform and dealing with mass incarceration in America which disproportionately impacts the African-American community.
Hakeem Jeffries
#43. We need to keep making our streets safer and our criminal justice system fairer - our homeland more secure, our world more peaceful and sustainable for the next generation.
Barack Obama
#44. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#45. I encourage everyone to pay attention to the issues that matter to you, from jobs and the economy, to education and our schools, to criminal justice reform. Whatever it is that you care about, make sure you use your voice.
Two Chainz
#46. 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.
Matt Gonzalez
#47. Criminal justice is what happens after a complicated series of events has gone bad. It is the end result of failure
the failure of a group of people that sometimes includes, but is never limited to, the accused person.
Paul Delano Butler
#48. One of the most corrosive aspects of the criminal justice system is its toleration of the insanity defense...Legitimate in some few cases, the insanity defense has been rendered farcical through its manipulation by so-called experts.
Robert K. Tanenbaum
#49. Everywhere among the English-speaking race criminal justice was rude, and punishments were barbarous; but the tendency was to do away with special privileges and legal exemptions.
Albert Bushnell Hart
#50. I don't really retain much from the first couple semesters of my criminal justice studies.
Michael Trucco
#51. I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.
Eric Holder
#52. 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.
Tim McDonald
#53. We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#54. The reason I like the criminal justice system is there aren't Republican or Democrat victims or police officers or prosecutors. It's about respect for the rule of law!
Trey Gowdy
#55. One of the most sensitive expressions of hope, capacity for change and potential vehicles for institutional health that I have read in my career in criminal justice.
Scott Harshbarger
#56. Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.
Karl Kraus
#57. I have heard that it was the perfection of the administration of criminal justice to take care that the punishment should come to few and the example to many.
Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon
#58. America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace.
Jimmy Webb
#59. 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.
Jonathan Larson
#60. As an example, in Texas a licensing law was passed that requires computer-repair technicians to obtain a criminal justice degree or serve a three-year apprenticeship under a licensed private investigator.
Brian Phillips
#61. If you grew up where I grew up, you would experience a very different criminal justice system than Camden, New Jersey.
Cory Booker
#62. When we lose faith in our officers of the law, it harms all of as. It cripples our criminal justice system. It threatens the most vulnerable parts of our community. It allows money and power to subvert justice.
Rob Thomas
#63. 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.
Sam Sheppard
#64. I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum.
Cory Booker
#65. Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.
George Will
#66. The U.S. Supreme Court has called free will a "universal and persistent" foundation for our system of law, distinct from "a deterministic view of human conduct that is inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system" (United States v. Grayson, 1978).
Sam Harris
#67. 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.
David Levering Lewis
#68. 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.
Michael Connelly
#69. 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.
Paul Gillmor
#70. 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.
Robert Bly
#71. Much of the way food has been shaped and formed in prisons is due to the cultural thought about prisoners in general, and how they should be treated by society and by the state. Food in prison is a reflection of culture and cultural thinking about criminal justice and reform.
Erika Camplin
#72. Wall Street crime, in part, is a confidence game in which the criminal justice system itself is the mark.
Matt Taibbi
#73. Dealing with a simple burglary can require 1,000 process steps and 70 forms to be completed as a case goes through the Criminal Justice System. That can't be right.
Theresa May
#74. 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.
Steve Earle
#75. I majored in criminal justice. I like 'CSI,' all that, '24.' I watch those shows on A&E, if I watch TV. I don't really watch TV shows.
Paul Pierce
#76. Johnny Cash was a rebel, not only just in the musical sense, but he was somebody who was for the people, and an advocate for labor, for workers, for prisoners, people who have been trapped by the criminal justice system.
Michael Franti
#77. We'll be launching the new public prosecution service in Northern Ireland tomorrow. I'll be doing it in Belfast tomorrow. This is an entirely new era, in which criminal justice now exercised on an equal basis, not the old basis in which community division was a feature.
Peter Hain
#78. 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.
Eliot Spitzer
#79. In January 2013, I told the people in the Justice Department after the re-election that I wanted to focus on reforming the federal criminal justice system. I made an announcement in August of that year in San Francisco, when we rolled out the Smart on Crime initiative.
Eric Holder
#80. We need to incorporate that age-old concept of redemption into the work that we do in the criminal justice system in California.
Kamala Harris
#81. The fate of millions of people - indeed the future of the black community itself - may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.
Michelle Alexander
#82. You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college. And, you know, part of my job, that I can do, I think, without any potential conflicts, is to get at those root causes.
Barack Obama
#83. Whether or not we can save Lake Michigan, whether or not we can avoid a breakdown in our criminal justice system are more important than whether or not I'm going to be governor.
Bill Scott
#84. At least 80 percent of American prisoners are grossly over-sentenced. The Supreme Court knows this, but shows scant concern for this human side of criminal justice.
Conrad Black
#85. Michael Brown's death and the suffocation of Eric Garner in New York for selling untaxed cigarettes indicate something is wrong with criminal justice in America.
Rand Paul
#86. My dean gave me permission to model during my work semester, even though I was in the Criminal Justice Department. I don't know whether I'd ever have become a model if he hadn't let me do that.
Beverly Johnson
#87. All decisions in the criminal justice system must be determined by the physical and scientific evidence, and the credible testimony corroborated by that evidence, not in response to public outcry.
Robert P. McCulloch
#88. I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
Henry Louis Gates
#89. So why was I so scared? Because crime is something relative; it's something the government defines and redefines whenever it pleases.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi
#90. It is quick to over punish and uninterested in rewarding good behavior. What would we say about an individual who had these characteristics? Mean? Cruel? Heartless? Mindless? Hypocritical? Stupid?
Bernard B. Kerik
#91. A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.
Alan Dershowitz
#92. There is one transcendant advantage belonging to the province of the State governments ... -I mean the ordinary administration of criminal and civil justice.
Alexander Hamilton
#93. In a free and democratic society such as ours, justice should not eternally abrogate one's rights to freedom and liberty, except in the most extreme cases.
Bernard B. Kerik
#94. All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#95. But for their right to judge of the law, and the justice of the law, juries would be no protection to an accused person, even as to matters of fact; for, if the government can dictate to a jury any law whatever, in a criminal case, it can certainly dictate to them the laws of evidence.
Lysander Spooner
#96. There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.
Montesquieu
#97. I believe [ ... ] that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
Neil Gaiman
#98. Mercy is not what every criminal is entitled to. What he is entitled to is justice.
Lord Hailsham
#99. As he himself said, I will prove it to you, gentlemen, and i will prove it in two ways. First in the blinding clarity of the facts, and second, in the dim light cast by the mind of his criminal soul.
Albert Camus
#100. Every transgression and disobedience receives a just recompense of reward, except with those who truly love themselves.
Auliq Ice
