Political Quotes

“I thank the gentlewoman. I appreciate the gentleman from New York and certainly the gentlewoman from Ohio for organizing this Special Order to discuss the need for criminal justice reform. Mr. Speaker, we have serious, fundamental problems with our criminal justice system today. For too long, policymakers have chosen to play politics with crime policy by enacting so-called tough on crime slogans and sound bites, such as three strikes and you are out, mandatory minimum sentences, and--if you get it to rhyme, apparently, it is better--if you do the adult crime, you do the adult time. As appealing as these policies sound, their impacts range from a negligible reduction in crime to actually increasing the crime rate. As a result of these policies, the United States, despite representing only 5 percent of the world's population, has 25 percent of the world's prisoners and now has the highest incarceration rate of any nation's, by far, in the world. There are 2.2 million people behind bars in this country. That is triple the number of prisoners we had just three decades ago. At over 700 persons incarcerated for every 100,000 in the population, the United States far exceeds the world's average incarceration rate of about 100 per 100,000. Recent studies have questioned the sanity of this mass incarceration.…”