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. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Yes, for my undergrad I majored in Criminal Justice and minored in Political Science and English.
Matthew McGrory
#9. A criminal trial is never about seeking justice for the victim. If it were, there could be only one verdict: guilty.
Alan Dershowitz
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Generally speaking, the public appetite for criminal justice policy is just tough talk.
Kamala Harris
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.
Werner Herzog
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.
Montesquieu
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Mercy is not what every criminal is entitled to. What he is entitled to is justice.
Lord Hailsham
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. The criminal justice system, like any system designed by human beings, clearly has its flaws.
Ben Whishaw
#35. I'm from here, born and raised, and I'm a criminal justice major.
Jamie McGuire
#36. Every transgression and disobedience receives a just recompense of reward, except with those who truly love themselves.
Auliq Ice
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. "Criminal justice" was a term she found more apt than it was meant to be.
Barbara Neely
#41. The victim to too severe a law is considered as a martyr rather than a criminal.
Charles Caleb Colton
#42. For too long, the victims of crime have been the forgotten persons of our criminal justice system.
Ronald Reagan
#43. There is no greater threat to a free and democratic nation than a government that fails to protect its citizen's freedom and liberty as aggressively as it pursues justice.
Bernard B. Kerik
#44. It cannot bring back and make whole those who suffered and died by a racist's criminal hand. But it can at least reaffirm our nation's commitment to seek the truth and make equal justice a reality.
Christopher Dodd
#45. I pretended I had urgent business at the prosecutor's table which, in one of The System's obvious tells, was always millimeters from the jury box.
Sergio De La Pava
#46. 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
#47. The courts used to be, fair and square, the avengers of secular crimes; but nowadays they demand respect even for the criminal.
Franz Grillparzer
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. I have never stuck up for any criminal. I have merely asked for the orderly administration of an impartial justice ... Due legal process is my own safeguard against being convicted unjustly. To my mind, that's government. That's law and order.
Erle Stanley Gardner
#51. The civil justice system is a backup system when the criminal justice system fails.
Ralph Nader
#52. 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
#53. We pay a lot for our court service, but it's not enough. Courts are under-resourced, which leads to delayed justice - particularly in criminal courts.
Heather Brooke
#55. 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
#56. 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.
#57. 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
#58. States and counties routinely bear the costs associated with incarcerating undocumented criminal aliens once they enter the criminal justice system.
Michael Dean Crapo
#59. He convinced me that if we're going to have honest government that you can't leave it up to the crooks and that honest people have to get involved in government. So I did. I got involved as a criminal prosecutor with the U. S. Justice Department.
Bill Scott
#60. Race determines everything in the criminal justice system
Mark Geragos
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Providing adequate representation even for defendants who appear guilty is the best way to protect those who are not.
Deborah L. Rhode
#70. It is only when we see the worst that Man can offer, that we begin to see the best that Man still holds. If they are blinded by greed, then it's time to pick up our virtual stones so we can start knocking sense into 'em...
Faith Brashear
#71. No one should ever be wrongfully deprived of their rights to liberty and freedom without just cause, yet in the past 25 years alone thousands of people have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to tens of thousands of years in prison.
Bernard B. Kerik
#72. Everyone writes the book he or she loves to read. Great authors write the books others love to read.
Chuck Miceli
#73. 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
#74. So the difference between a criminal and a hero is the order in which their vile crimes are committed. And justice comes with a sell-by date. In that case, you'd better hurry. You wouldn't want your heroism to spoil.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#75. I don't really retain much from the first couple semesters of my criminal justice studies.
Michael Trucco
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Prison is for rapists, thieves, and murderers. If you lock someone up for smoking a plant that makes them happy, then you're the fucking criminal.
Joe Rogan
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.
Karl Kraus
#83. 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
#84. There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime. That is not an exaggeration.
John Baker
#85. American citizens should not lose their constitutional rights because they lack the money to pay for them.
Bernard B. Kerik
#86. America's criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace.
Jimmy Webb
#87. There is no client as scary as an innocent man.
J. Michael Haller, Criminal Defense Attorney, Los Angeles, 1962.
Michael Connelly
#88. 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
#89. The failure to invest in civil justice is directly related to the increase in criminal disorder. The more people feel there is injustice the more it becomes part of their psyche.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
#90. 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
#91. If you grew up where I grew up, you would experience a very different criminal justice system than Camden, New Jersey.
Cory Booker
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum.
Cory Booker
#95. Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.
George Will
#96. Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#97. I am ready to face the International Criminal Court of Justice at the Hague for prosecution over roles played by me when the war ended
Yakubu Gowon
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
