Deval Patrick on Crime

Supports criminal rehabilitation and alternative sentencing

Indicate which principles you support regarding crime.
• Support programs to provide prison inmates with vocational and job-related skills.
• Implement penalties other than incarceration for certain non-violent offenders.
• Increase state funding for community centers in areas with at-risk youth.
• Strengthen sex-offender laws.
• Allow police to ticket motorists for not wearing their safety belts, even if they have committed no other traffic violation.

Focus on guns & gang violence, not immigration status

PATRICK: Well I think it's a matter of priorities is what it is. The idea of training the state police so that they can recognize and do their duties, who can argue with that. But with gun and gang violence as soaring as it is in urban communities all over the Commonwealth it seems to me that there's a whole lot else that we ought to have the state police and all law enforcement concentrating on. What I will do as governor is get engaged in the Congress with a balanced and rational approach advocated now on a bipartisan basis by Senator McCain and Senator Kennedy to bring some reason and some real solutions to our immigration issues.

Opposes death penalty

Deval Patrick On the issues
• Death penalty: Opposes