Quotes About Reintegration

This is so much like the old days. And, again, I have mixed feelings. In some ways it's good and comfortable to be fitting straight back in like I've never been away, but, on the other hand, I'm getting this constrictive feeling as well. It's the same places - like the bars and pubs on Friday night - the same people, the same conversations, the same arguments and the same attitudes. Five years away and not much seems to have changed. I can't decide if this is good or bad.

In my experience, the ex-military guys came in two types. The first grew long hair, sprouted beards, and indulged in all the things they hadn't been able do while they'd been in the armed forces. The second did their best to pretend they never got out.

Young men who have been away, been to war, they are different when they come home.

Despite the fact that in America we incarcerate more juveniles for life terms than in any other country in the world, the truth is that the vast majority of youth offenders will one day be released. The question is simple and stark. Do we want to help them change or do we want to help them become even more violent and dangerous?

Let's help those in prison maintain positive connections with their community. If we truly want re-entry to be successful, and we do, people need to come back to a place that still feels like home.

Three days: that's the average time for someone to relapse after getting out of prison.

Sixty-five million Americans with a criminal record face a total of 45,000 collateral consequences that restrict everything from employment, professional licensing, child custody rights, housing, student aid, voting, and even the ability to visit an incarcerated loved one. Many of these restrictions are permanent, forever preventing those who've already served their time from reaching their potential in the workforce, as parents, and as productive citizens.

I do a number of things working on human rights issues, prison recidivism rates, and then I also push and have worked a lot on the social issues of rebuilding the family.

In some sense, when you take a child soldier out of an armed group, you've taken away the identity he or she has had for years, and you can't assume life is just going to return to normal.

Any soldier deployed overseas will think fondly of home. It is only right and fair that they are able to settle back into a home life once they leave their service.

It's not just: you get off the plane, you're back home, everything's fine. Maybe the physical danger ends, but soldiers are still deeply at risk of being injured in a different way.

When you get out of the military, all you are doing is a work-up for the longest deployment of your life.

Returning to Earth, that was the challenging part.

Please God, I'll never be in a war zone, but everything I sort of know about people who come back is that it's a hard transition to make. I mean, even if you've not been in a war, even if you've just been in the Forces, you come back and probably have more fights in civilian life.

Without turning prison life into something more meaningful, prisoners are more likely to reoffend.

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.

They program you to have no emotion – like if somebody sitting next to you gets killed you just have to carry on doing your job and shut up,' Steve Annabell, a British veteran of the Falkan War … 'When you leave the service, when you come back from a situation like that, there's no button they can press to switch your emotions back on. So you walk around like a zombie. They don't deprogram you. If you become a problem they just sweep you under the carpet.

Fay, there are only two types of blacks ever released from these places, the Carters and the broken men. The broken men are so damaged that they will never again be suitable members of any sort of social unit. Everything that was still good when they entered the joint, anything inside of them that may have escaped the ruinous effects of black colonial existence, anything that may have been redeemable when they first entered the joint—is gone when they leave.

America is the land of the second chance - and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

It is not the prisoners who need reformation, it is the prisons.

He's paid his debt to society. You can't keep a man in jail because you think he might commit a crime

Why would anyone expect Tyson to come out smarter? He went to prison for four years, not Princeton.

I met soldiers coming back from war and I was impressed by their description of PTSD, all the symptoms: the outburst of violence, the impossibility to cope with reality anymore, all that stuff.

The Marine Corps forced me to come home from Afghanistan. It's up to me to allow myself to come home.