Time & Perspective Quote by Bobby Scott

Strip away the carrots, and you shouldnt be shocked when the horse stops moving. Bobby Scott, speaking as a legislator steeped in criminal-justice policy, frames rehabilitation not as a moral abstraction but as a practical system of behavioral economics: incentives are the scaffolding that gets people to show up, persist, and outperform their own worst habits inside a place designed to erode agency.

The quotes quiet target isnt inmates; its a political mood that treats punishment as proof of seriousness. By listing parole, good time credits, and college funding in one breath, Scott links three arenas that reform opponents often isolate: early release (seen as softness), sentence reductions (seen as loopholes), and education (seen as perks). His point is that they are not perks at all but levers. Remove them, and participation in literacy and treatment programs becomes an act of pure self-abnegation with no tangible payoff in a setting where time is the only currency.

Scott also chooses careful, bureaucratic verbs - participate, excel - that hint at a performance gap created by policy, not character. The subtext is a rebuke to lawmakers who demand lower recidivism while defunding the mechanisms that produce it. Its a consequentialist argument: if the goal is safer communities, you dont sabotage the pipeline that turns idle time into skills, sobriety, and self-management.

The larger context is the late tough-on-crime hangover, when eliminating parole and shrinking prison programming became a bipartisan signal of resolve. Scott punctures that theater with a simple causal chain: incentives drive engagement; engagement drives change; policy can either cultivate or choke it.