Crime And Punishment Justice Quotes & Sayings

They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. — Jonathan Swift

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime. — John Stuart Mill

For every crime that comes before him, a judge is required to complete a perfect syllogism in which the major premise must be the general law; the minor, the action that conforms or does not conform to the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment. If the judge were constrained, or if he desired to frame even a single additional syllogism, the door would thereby be opened to uncertainty. — Cesare Beccaria

The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over from an earlier age. Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system. — Michel Foucault

To see justice done, men were prepared to take the law into their own hands. In the Carolinas, bands of vigilantes or Regulators crisscrossed the territory in the late 1760s, stamping out local hooligans and waging war on interlopers. This vigilante attitude was epitomized by a Scots Borders descendant from Pittsylvania County, Virginia, named Captain William Lynch. He ruled as virtual dictator of his county, punishing wrongdoers and warning lawless elements that "we will inflict such corporal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained." "Lynch's Law," and the punishments and hangings it inflicted, also became part of American culture - an ugly part, but a legacy of a harsh world and a harsh, unforgiving people. — Arthur Herman

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. — George Bernard Shaw

He's bound to have done something, Nobby repeated.
In this he was echoing the Patrician's view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done. — Terry Pratchett

Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in. — Barry Unsworth

The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed. — Michelle Alexander

Isn't Santa just a stand in for the society that has locked them up for formative years? Something that watches and judges, telling them that they got what they deserved based on their behavior? Surely they have to have noticed that Saint Nick, like the judicial system itself, tends to look more favorably upon rich children. He is fat, white, past middle age, and holds all the cards. — Thomm Quackenbush

They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves. — Arundhati Roy

Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood. — Dimitri A. Bogazianos

Why does crime, even when as powerful as Caesar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble? — Henryk Sienkiewicz

Vice may triumph for a time, crime may flaunt its victories in the face of honest toilers, but in the end the law will follow the wrong-doer to a bitter fate, and dishonor and punishment will be the portion of those who sin. — Allan Pinkerton

The ideas of justice of Europe and Africa are not the same and those of the one world are unbearable to the other. To the African there is but one way of counter-balancing the catastrophes of existence, it shall be done by replacement; he does not look for the motive of an action. Whether you lie in wait for your enemy and cut his throat in the dark; or you fell a tree, and a thoughtless stranger passes by and is killed; so far as punishment goes, to the Native mind, it is the same thing. A loss has been brought upon the community and must be made up for, somewhere, by somebody. The Native will not give time or thought to the weighing of guilt or desert; either he fears that this may lead him too far, or he reasons that such things are no concerns of his. But he will devote himself, in endless speculations, to the method by which crime or disaster shall be weighed up in sheep and goats - time does not count to him; he leads you solemnly into a sacred maze of sophistry. — Karen Blixen

For people condemned to death, tradition prescribes an austere ceremony, calculated to emphasize that all passions and anger have died down, and that the act of justice represents only a sad duty towards society which moves even the executioner to pity for the victim. Thus the condemned man is shielded from all external cares, he is granted solitude and, should he want it, spiritual comfort; in short, care is taken that he should feel around him neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity and justice, and by means of punishment, pardon. But to us this was not granted, for we were many and time was short. And in any case, what had we to repent, for what crime did we need pardon? — Primo Levi

Justice isn't about fixing the past; it's about healing the past's future. — Jackson Burnett

Every transgression and disobedience receives a just recompense of reward, except with those who truly love themselves. — Auliq Ice

If life was fair ... one third of the people would comprise of judges and lawyers ... one third of police and prison officials ... and one third of legislators ... and one third more to make the other three thirds make any sense at all .... Thank goodness for no fair. — Brian Spellman

Al Qaeda is using our liberal justice system," he continued. I really don't know what liberal justice system he was talking about: the U.S. broke the world record for the number of people it has in prison. Its prison population is over two million, more than any other country in the world, and its rehabilitation programs are a complete failure. The United States is the "democratic" country with the most draconian punishment system; in fact, it is a good example of how draconian punishments do not help in stopping crimes. Europe is by far more just and humane, and the rehab programs there work, so the crime rate in Europe is decisively lower than the U.S. But the American proverb has it, "When the going gets rough, the rough get going." Violence naturally produces violence; the only loan you can make with a guarantee of payback is violence. It might take some time, but you will always get your loan back. — Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Sec. 10. Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation from him that has done it: and any other person, who finds it just, may also join with him that is injured, and assist him in recovering from the offender so much as may make satisfaction for the harm he has suffered. — John Locke

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:

Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.
— John DeFrancis

Fear follows crime and is its punishment. — Voltaire

Crime and punishment can be summed up in two classifications: there are bad people and there are people who get into bad situations. The lines for liberation and rehabilitation should first begin with the people who get into bad situations. — Johnnie Dent Jr.

Plea Against the Death Penalty
Look, examine, reflect. You hold capital punishment up as an example. Why? Because of what it teaches. And just what is it that you wish to teach by means of this example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach that "thou shalt not kill"? By killing.
I have examined the death penalty under each of its two aspects: as a direct action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but something horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is called a crime when an individual commits it, but is (sadly) called "justice" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges, in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed. — Victor Hugo

If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow. — Steve Allen

Don't you believe that the punishment should fit the crime? Isn't that what justice is? Letely, though, I wonder if we've gotten more into vengenance than justice. — Whoopi Goldberg

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions
poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed
which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.
It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity. — Howard Zinn