Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries.

Men commit murder and all sorts of mayhem, in a few years they're back on the streets. Highway robbery and white collar crime, and they laugh at the system they beat.

I have never understood the liberal assumption that if there were justice in the world, there would be fewer rather than more prisoners.

We're releasing hardened criminals from jails all over California. They don't have the money. They don't have the room anymore. The jails are overflowing so we gotta get rid of somebody.

We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Capitalism needs and must have the prison to protect itself from the criminals it has created.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

No funding for alternative sentencing instead of more prisons.

If Americans actually have the conversation about our disastrous prison policies, we'll understand the trends all move in very dangerous directions: we lock up more people, for less violent crime, at ever greater expense, breeding more dangerous criminals who often come out unemployable, violent and isiolated.

The prison life of the past looks in our own time like liberation itself.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

No one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong -- only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that way. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong, for that which is done cannot be undone, but he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again.

If the people would but analyze the human equation of a prison they might better account for the crimes that are visited upon them in cities, towns, and hamlets, ofttimes by men who graduated with an education and equipment for just that sort of retributive service from some penal institution.

we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.

Then once you get people locked up, it's an incredibly inhuman system.

President Obama became the first sitting president to visit a federal prison yesterday. Obama said it was a good chance to talk about prison reform, and to catch up with so many former congressmen.

Our prison population quintupled in a thirty year period of time. Not doubled or tripled - quintupled. We went from a prison and jail population of about 300,000 to now more than 2 million.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted . . . and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate.

I've written about illegal immigrants in the United States; I spent a year following migrant farm workers as they were harvesting. I've written about our criminal justice system, and how it treats the victims of crime. I've been working for years now on a book about prisons in America, and I've been going into prisons and traveling around the country and seeing what's going on.

For some people, their idea of getting tough is longer suspended sentences.

When I went out to shoot for the first time, I thought this was going to be about the prison industrial complex, purely about prison for profit and the ways in which there's an industry making money and profiting off punishment.

It is indeed strange that with all the knowledge we have gained in the past hundred years we preserve and practice the methods of an ancient and barbarous world in our dealing with crime. So long as this is observed and exercised there can be no change except to heap more cruelties and more wretchedness upon those who are the victims of our foolish system.

They [prisons] are not designed to rehabilitate the - the inmate, though the, the public propaganda is that this is their function.

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.