Anyone who sits in our jails who is not just a criminal but what we call a terrorist, with or without blood on his hands - and these definitions are also unclear to me - should not be sitting in our custody.
When a man sits in our jails for a number of years, and around him friends and family become angry, that is how we create terrorists.
Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one of a series of prisons on U.S. military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance.
We spoke at endless cabinet meetings about the need to stop the flow of money to the families of terrorists and to the terrorists in jails.
Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.
It makes a lot more sense for us to be investing in jobs and education rather than jails and incarceration.
The status quo tough-on-crime policies of the '90s and 2000s are not working and are not popular. And it provides me with hope about the possibilities for San Francisco and this whole country in terms of moving away from our dependence on prisons and jails to solve social problems.
Homelessness, open air drug use and mental illness - which we all see in this city - are things we've been relying on the DA's office and the jails to deal with. That's really expensive, inhumane and ineffective.
All it takes is a single person coming into or going out of the jail or prison with COVID-19, and the entire jail will likely be infected. Most jails have people living in very close quarters.
We should not have people in prisons and jails who aren't a violent threat.
