Alexis Carrel Quotes

The time for the State to protect himself against the criminal is before the criminal is made. Most criminals are not born, they are made.... What a State really punishes in a criminal is its own neglect, it's own failure to do its duty to the citizens.

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?

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

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.

By incarcerating someone who is homeless or addicted or who suffers from mental health challenges, we only further destabilize that person and create situations where they are more likely to commit crimes in the future.

All issues of crime are better addressed at the state level.

Labour is the party of law and order in Britain today. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

I spent my first three weeks there on a wing with 21 murderers. I met some very evil people there but also some men who'd had no upbringing, no chance in life.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

The role of government is to protect the public health.

Deinstitutionalization has succeeded in decreasing the overall number of hospital beds, but an unforeseen consequence has been the proportional increase in the number of people with mental illnesses housed in the criminal justice system. Worse, once imprisoned, people with mental illness are shown to have much longer incarcerations than other inmates, primarily because a prison environment and lack of treatment aggravate the very illness that has led to their objectionable or antisocial behavior.

The United States imprisons many non-violent offenders who could instead be required to pay fines, perform community service, and make restitution to their victims… Maintaining our vast network of prisons consumes resources that could be better spent on education and other crime prevention efforts... Rather than reforming offenders, prison too often degrades and dehumanizes prisoners, making the task of rehabilitation and reentry into society even more difficult.

The jails and prisons are the new insane asylums. That’s what we are.

A duty to the public must be to stop prisoners reoffending through successful rehabilitation.

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.

It is a huge asset to law and order that serious or persistent criminals should be taken out of the society on which they prey. It makes life safer for the law-abiding and on the whole prisons are pretty good at containing those who have been committed to them.

Unfortunately, if the man who leaves the prison gates is just as likely or - as is sometimes grievously the case - more likely to offend as he was when he entered them, then we fail not only the individual but public safety as well.

No one wants dangerous criminals in our communities.

As a law-enforcement official, as a politician, you are always going to have in the back of your mind the fear that someone you release will end up committing another crime, potentially a serious crime, during a period when they otherwise would have been incarcerated.

For the offenders completing these short sentences whose lives are destabilised, and for society which incurs a heavy financial and social cost, prison simply isn't working.

Too often, we see violent criminals return to the streets they have previously terrorized, only to commit more violent crimes.

I think we will be safer when we can concentrate law enforcement and criminal justice resources and energies on those individuals who truly need, for the safety of society... to be incarcerated.

I would make the case that the vast majority of prisoners leave prison and go back into society. We share that society with them and what sort of people do we want them to be.

Too many communities are living in fear as violent crime rises. So we need to reform our justice system to keep our streets safe and protect the law-abiding majority. That means putting an end to soft sentences and punishing offenders by keeping them behind bars so that the public can be protected and the offenders can be rehabilitated.