Idries Shah Quotes

In any case, frequent punishments are a sign of weakness or slackness in the government. There is no man so bad that he cannot be made good for something. No man should be put to death, even as an example, if he can be left to live without danger to society.

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.

Victims of crime and the wider community deserve a grown-up debate on our criminal justice system and how we can make it work - for those within it and for those it protects.

Pardoning the Bad, is injuring the Good.

Imprisonment has become the response of first resort to far too many of our social problems.

I yearn to see other chief executives throughout the nation follow suit, so that as a people we may hasten the elimination of barbarism as a tool of American justice.

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.

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?

If we were really tough on crime, we'd do more to stop it from happening in the first place.

I do a number of things working on human rights issues, prison recidivism rates, and then I also push and have worked a lot on the social issues of rebuilding the family.

We want a state of things in which crime will not pay.

We spend an awful lot of money on the criminal justice system that could better be spent at the other end of the spectrum.

I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them…

Retribution is no longer the dominant objective of the criminal law. Reformation and rehabilitation of offenders have become important goals of criminal jurisprudence.

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

Probation is a less-well-known branch of our justice system, compared with, say, police and prisons, but that doesn't make it any less important. Hundreds of thousands of offenders each year are rehabilitated back into society by probation, which is crucial for the public's safety.

The purpose of the criminal justice system is both to rehabilitate and to punish. If we can rehabilitate somebody, that's a huge, huge win.

Instead of investing our resources in locking people up, let's invest more of those resources in our fellow citizens so they don't end up in the system to begin with. And if they do, they can get back on their feet.

The claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: For the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted and jailed.

We need transformational change of our criminal justice system - not just, you know, a handful of consent decrees or policy reforms.

I have never articulated a specific number, but I think a nation as great as we are, that professes to favor freedom and liberty, that we would find a way to evidence that in our criminal justice system by achieving what we know we can achieve: a reduction in crime, a reduction in taxpayer expense, and a reduction in the prison population.

Evolving societal values indicate that the death penalty should be abolished in its entirety.

I believe the public therefore expect the justice system to focus on rehabilitation to reduce the risk of subsequent offending - and the likelihood of them becoming a victim of crime.