Cesare Beccaria Quotes

Punishment can do a lot for criminals, and send a message to the rest of society.

The truth is you cannot decrease the severity and certainty of sentences without increasing crime. It's simply impossible.

Nothing will deter crime but the certainty of punishment.

Criminals are punished, that others may be deterred.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment.

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

Severity of punishment is not the cure for crime. Certainty and promptness of punishment rather than severity are more effective. There was a time, as we all know, when in England considerably more than two hundred separate offenses were punishable by death. Nevertheless, that period was one of the most lawless and violent known to history. The utter failure of the drastic technique in the suppression of crime is universally acknowledged.

Without the punishment of the Death by a Thousand Cuts, I am afraid people in China would have nothing to fear … and before long there would be more and more criminals, and it would be hard to ensure peace and stability.

The act of policing is, in order to punish less often, to punish more severely.

It doesn't help to wait until something happens and then prosecute the offenders, especially if it's the idea of the offender to extinguish himself in the commission of the crime.

Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.

To make crime unprofitable, let the government run it.

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

I think it's common sense to say that the longer away from a crime it gets prosecuted, the less deterrent effect there is.

Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

As an American I wanted to explore... why are we the only first world country that still has capital punishment? Is it because we're too afraid to really examine the system, or is it because we really truly believe that this is the best way to deter future crime?

I support public hanging for its deterrent effect.

It [the death penalty] is a phony issue. To pretend the death penalty is going to end crime in the United States is to fool people, to promote public ignorance.

Capital punishment may not be much of a deterrent against murder, but the sight of a few corpses swinging from a scaffold might work with drug dealers.

The end of punishment, therefore, is no other than to prevent the criminal from doing further injury to society, and to prevent others from committing the like offence. Such punishments, therefore, and such a mode of inflicting them, ought to be chosen, as will make the strongest and most lasting impressions on the minds of others, with the least torment to the body of the criminal

I think one of the keys to any crime-prevention program that's got to be developed is to focus on punishment - to let people know that there is a sanction and a punishment for hurting others.

For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes.

If harsher laws are put in place, less will dare to break them.

No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.