The Criminal Justice System Quotes

#1. Wall Street crime, in part, is a confidence game in which the criminal justice system itself is the mark.

Matt Taibbi

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

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

George Will

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Henry Louis Gates

#18. Race determines everything in the criminal justice system

Mark Geragos

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Ben Whishaw

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Ralph Nader

#31. 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.

#32. States and counties routinely bear the costs associated with incarcerating undocumented criminal aliens once they enter the criminal justice system.

Michael Dean Crapo

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. American citizens should not lose their constitutional rights because they lack the money to pay for them.

Bernard B. Kerik

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

Jimmy Webb

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. I am happy that the urgency to reform our broken criminal justice system has found allies all across the political spectrum.

Cory Booker

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

Ronald Reagan

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.

Montesquieu

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. 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