Viv Albertine Quotes

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

Crime is contagious.

Incarceration begets more incarceration, and incarceration also begets more crime, which in turn invites more aggressive enforcement, which then re-supplies incarceration …

No penal or political system which multiplies the population of the prisons at the rate of 10 per cent every year will solve a problem which is growing to be more and more of a danger to the social and moral life of the nation.

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

Gang members aren't frightened into acceptable behavior by increased penalties, enhanced punishments, and the promise of new detention facilities.

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.

In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, 'See this kid? He'll kill.'

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.

We've got to clear some of the room out of the prisons so we can put the bad guys in there, like the pedophiles and the politicians.

Crimes sometimes shock us too much; vices almost always too little.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

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

We have determined as a society, as a country, as a people, that the incarceration and the supervision and the specific fines for a particular crime are that person's debt to society.

In a colony constituted like that of New South Wales, the proportion of crime must of course be great.

A working detective has no hope of understanding what even experts who devote their lives to the study of criminal psychology can't figure out.

A lot of the friends I had went on to become criminals.

We make no apology for people who should be in prison being in prison.

For the past seven years we have been cracking down on crime in Missouri, passing tougher laws for drug crimes and sex offenses and requiring prisoners to serve more time.

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.

I haven't been part of the criminal world.

We have the crime of the century every six months. So for people like me who enjoy, you know, taking these stories and writing about them, the material is endless.

My main dream - and I'm trying to get 'Living TV' to do it - is to go into prison and interview serial killers, rapists, murderers, psychopaths.