Neal A. Maxwell Quotes

But passing by all other considerations, and contemplating merely the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them.

Given the devastation that crime can visit on families and communities, I will err on being a little too tough on crime than being too soft on crime.

I think of my brother just out of prison again. He will have spent ten years of the last 30 in prison.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all.

We haven't had crime writers, and for a long time in the Republic, we didn't seem to have a crime problem as such.

My pop did a little time.

My grandmother always taught me, 'If you don't have a home, family, and church, you don't have anything.'

Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?

'Getting smart on crime' does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

As a society we're always so quick and able to spend money on lawyers for someone for incarceration, but we don't make the corresponding commitment to the preventative components of it.

My home is not a place, it is people.

Criminals are not the victims of society; society is the victim of criminals.

If you allow young folk to be abominably brought up and their characters corrupted little by little, from childhood; and if then you punish them as grown-ups for committing the crimes to which their training has consistently inclined them, what else is this, I ask, but first making thieves and then punishing them for it?

These men who come out of prison have offended against society, they cannot expect that society will immediately forget their offense. On the other hand, for its own protection, society would do well to make it possible at least for such men and women as really wish to go straight, to go straight. We must face the fact that once a person has found it possible to get a living in crooked ways, they have a knowledge which makes it easier to return to those ways than if they had never known them. Therefore it is harder to keep in the straight and narrow path of virtue!

Why cannot some of the money the government spends be used to take the children and youths who will become criminals, and educate them and put them into suitable environments so that they will become normal people?

There is little evidence that the length of a sentence, as opposed to its certainty, has significant deterrent effects. If we cut sentences in half across the board, there is no reason to believe we’d see an appreciable rise in crime, and over time we would most likely see a large drop in the prison population.

The key for members of the public is that they want criminals to be punished. They want them taken off the streets. They also want criminals who come out of prison to go straight.

There's a reason why my mom chose to stay and raise my brothers and me in Kansas - it's a great place to live, work and raise a family.

Born in the Village. My mom still lives on Bleeker Street. I went to the performing arts high school.

We'll get way further if we educate people and not lock them up.

For me, Barca was where I grew up since I was tiny, from eight years old.

A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.

Every unpunished delinquency has a family of delinquencies.

Home is the wallpaper above the bed, the family dinner table, the church bells in the morning, the bruised shins of the playground, the small fears that come with dusk, the streets and squares and monuments and shops that constitute one's first universe.