Boris Johnson Quotes

You will feel the full force of the law and if you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishments. And to these people I would say this: you are not only wrecking the lives of others, you are potentially wrecking your own life too.

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

Targets don't fight crime.

We are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.

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

Trying to solve the crime problem by building more prison cells is like trying to solve the problem of AIDS by building more hospitals.

The essence to reducing violent crime in our society is to take these people [criminals] off the street.

Society, by setting forth clear penalties for certain kinds of conduct sets its public ratification on moral judgments that this is wrong behavior and that it is deserving of punishment irrespective of whether the punishment will deter, rehabilitate or anything else. It is a way of society of defining what is wrong and what is seriously wrong.

Crime is contagious.

There is no system of regulation or law that can prevent crime, white collar or otherwise.

There's nothing we [the Congress] can do to eliminate crime.

Obviously crime pays, or there would be no crime.

A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.

Men are not hang'd for stealing Horses, but that Horses may not be stolen.

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.

Arresting people is not going to lower the crime rate

What has too often happened in the past is that people have threatened punishment but have failed to carry it out. It's imperative in any initiative that is undertaken that punishment be real and that there be truth in sentencing, and that the truly dangerous offenders - the recidivists and the career criminals - be put away and kept away.

Targets don't fight crime; they hinder the fight against crime.

Crimes happen, but some are preventable.

Simply put, violent criminals break the law - any law - every day with impunity.

When you criminalize something, only criminals can deal with it. When criminals deal with it, there's no recourse to law, so there's only recourse to violence.

Criminals know that if they stay under certain thresholds, nobody is going to come after them.

We need law enforcement as the ultimate deterrent to stop irresponsible and rash young people from making mistakes that will harm others and themselves. Put bluntly, we need them to be scared of getting caught and of getting punished.

I have prosecuted very serious criminals who are now serving very long jail sentences.

People who do crime do it for reward. But you end up in jail - that's no reward. Through crime, your ambitions are low.