Felix Frankfurter Quotes

The wiping out of crime is so largely an economic question because much crime arises from the fact that children grow up in undesirable surroundings and have parents that have been conditioned by the same type of environment.

What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.

The number one cause of crime is criminals.

If crime went down 100 percent it would still be 50 percent higher than it should be.

Poverty causes crime.

One of the things I learned is that you've got to deal with the underlying social problems if you want to have an impact on crime - that it's not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of violent crime where you see the greatest amount of social dysfunction.

Crime is a product of social excess.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

I believe that the high rates of property crime (and some of the increase in violent crime) are part of the price you pay for freedom.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.

Criminality is always the result of poverty. Countries that experience such a fundamental change as we have - we had the apartheid regime and must now develop a multicultural democracy - must necessarily pass through a phase of high crime rates.

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

A quarter of America is a dramatic, tense, violent country, exploding with contradictions, full of brutal, physiological vitality, and that is the America that I have really loved and love. But a good half of it is a country of boredom, emptiness, monotony, brainless production, and brainless consumption, and this is the American inferno.

When you come from desperate poverty, and that's exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I'm not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it's not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.

Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one's moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.

Crime is a tax on the poor

We still have an underclass in this country who are constantly ignored and vilified.

As someone who grew up in public housing, I've known these conditions.

I'm actually interested in poor behavior. I'm interested in what drives people to poor behavior.

I lived in a kind of a middle class home, and I didn't really have a lot of experience with the justice system or prisons or really being aware of that world.

There is no concept more generally cherished by publishers than that of the Undeserving Poor.

People see poverty all around them in India, but they are desensitized or immune to it. I came to the conclusion that poverty is driven by lack of education.

Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father.

You have young men of color in many communities who are more likely to end up in jail or in the criminal justice system than they are in a good job or in college. And, you know, part of my job, that I can do, I think, without any potential conflicts, is to get at those root causes.