Quotes About Recidivism

Where ex-offenders are genuinely trying to turn a corner and live free from crime, it is vital we do all we can to support them.

Studies have shown that inmate participation in education, vocational and job training, prison work skills development, drug abuse, mental health and other treatment programs, all reduce recidivism, significantly.

In court, judges tell people that their conviction carries a sentence of years, or probation. The truth is far more terrible. People convicted of crimes often become social outcasts for life, finding it difficult or impossible to rent an apartment, get a job, adopt children, access public benefits, serve on juries, or vote.

In regular circumstances, 60 percent of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to re-offend. What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80 percent. The Capsule had made the psychopaths worse.

Restoring a person's ability to achieve success when they leave the prison walls promotes public safety, builds our economy and, most importantly, is the right thing to do.

People coming out of jail need a path back into society: access to a job, a place to live, supportive services. We've seen what happens without it: they commit more crimes and return to jail, which is worse for everyone.

We lose our right to be surprised that California has the highest recidivism rate in the country if we refuse to hire folks who have taken responsibility for their crimes and have done their time.

Third domino: Statistically, rapists didn't just rape once. If they got away with it, they generally kept raping. Even if they didn't get away with it, the recidivism rate was so high that they might as well put a revolving door on every prison.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500 000 to 600 000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

People bring up Willie Horton or some other political bombshell in the past, but what they're not being intellectually honest about is if we do not work on early release, if we do not rehabilitate 95 percent of the people who go into the prison system and come out, far more innocent people are going to be harmed.

Each time I left prison, I left with the resolve to get my life together, to get a job, to get back on track. And each time, the task became more and more and more daunting.

In addition to making sense and serving the needs of justice, rehabilitating prisoners and releasing them when they are ready can save taxpayers money.

Castration decreases sexual urges in the subset of sex offenders with intense, obsessive, and pathological urges. But otherwise castration doesn't decrease recidivism rates; as stated in one meta-analysis, "hostile rapists and those who commit sex crimes motivated by power or anger are not amenable to treatment with [the antiandrogenic drugs].

We have to change public perception of ex-convicts. Most Canadians don't realize that when you come out of prison, you're a complete pariah. You can't get a car loan or money from a bank to start a business. So most end up back in prison within 24 months. It's just so wrong. We need to fix this problem.

This is not rocket science. If you mentor and support people when they leave prison they're less likely to reoffend.

We must do better by offenders who are sent to prison to make them less likely to return.

How come we never use prison, the failure of prison, as a reason not to give more prison? There's never a moment where we say, 'OK, well, prison hasn't worked, so we're not going to try that again.'

For the offenders completing these short sentences whose lives are destabilised, and for society which incurs a heavy financial and social cost, prison simply isn't working.

The generational cycle of people returning to prison has enormous, negative impacts on all Americans, especially the family members of incarcerated people.

Our prisons are full of people who are illiterate and innumerate, have been failed by the care system, and often have had a parent in prison.

It's an unfortunate fact that in the male black population, a very significant percentage of them, more so than whites or other minority candidates, because of convictions, prison records, are never going to be hired by a police department. That's a reality. That's not a byproduct of stop-and-frisk.

I think of my brother just out of prison again. He will have spent ten years of the last 30 in prison.

Restoring the right to vote to individuals who have served their term in prison is also a common-sense public safety measure.

Unfortunately, if the man who leaves the prison gates is just as likely or - as is sometimes grievously the case - more likely to offend as he was when he entered them, then we fail not only the individual but public safety as well.