Marc Veasey Quotes

We owe our children an environment in which they can flourish, and where law enforcement, the justice system, and society as offers them a fresh start, not a jail cell.

Victims of crime and the wider community deserve a grown-up debate on our criminal justice system and how we can make it work - for those within it and for those it protects.

Giving low-level offenders a second chance, no matter the color of their skin or the economic status they hold, can create opportunity for all of us.

We need transformational change of our criminal justice system - not just, you know, a handful of consent decrees or policy reforms.

Electing radical reformers as district attorneys is huge. It's essential.

I want to see changes in our criminal justice system.

We will never, ever weaken our resolve to be tough on the worst offenders. But we will responsibly take steps to assist our friends and neighbors who deserve a second chance to contribute to our society.

I went into criminal justice because I want to learn more about the law, about what's going on in this world, and be a mentor to kids from where I'm from.

Our reforms to criminal record disclosure will benefit ex-offenders, but there will a broader, more significant payoff for everyone in society.

As you may know, I'm the co-founder of a political organization called Real Justice. Our goal is to help elect progressive, reform-minded prosecutors and district attorneys that are committed to ending mass incarceration.

I really was in jail with Robert Downey Jr.

Without the reform of the justice system, there is no possibility of building a just state.

Boston's justice system is in serious need of reform. Many of its policies and practices are antiquated, expensive, and don't really even make Boston safer.

We've got to be able to distinguish between dangerous individuals who need to be incapacitated and incarcerated versus young people who are in an environment in which they are adapting, but if given different opportunities, a different vision of life, could be thriving the way we are. That's what strikes me. There but for the grace of God. And that, I think, is something that we all have to think about.

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.

Once you have been branded a criminal or felon, you are typically trapped for life.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

My creed of nonviolence does not favour the punishment of thieves and dacoits and even murderers.

We need to have more second chance programs. I'm glad that we're ending private prisons in the federal system; I want to see them ended in the state system.

Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.

Unless we maintain correctional institutions of such character that they create respect for law and government instead of breeding resentment and a desire for revenge, we are meeting lawlessness with stupidity and making a travesty of justice.

In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.

It's time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population.

...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.