Hannah Arendt Quotes

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

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

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

Nothing will deter crime but the certainty of punishment.

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

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

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.'

To make crime unprofitable, let the government run it.

You know what an effective deterrent to crime is? Jail! And do you know what kind of criminal penalty actually makes people think twice about committing crimes the next time? The kind that actually comes out of some individual's pocket, not fines that come out of the corporate kitty.

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?

Criminals are punished, that others may be deterred.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.

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.

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

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

If we have to build more prisons, it means we have failed.

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

Given the devastation that crime can visit on families and communities, I will err on being a little too tough on crime than being too soft on crime.

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

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.

In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity.

There is little evidence that the length of a sentence, as opposed to its certainty, has significant deterrent effects. If we cut sentences in half across the board, there is no reason to believe we’d see an appreciable rise in crime, and over time we would most likely see a large drop in the prison population.

Every first year law student learns that sentencing has four goals: retribution, incapicitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

The key for members of the public is that they want criminals to be punished. They want them taken off the streets. They also want criminals who come out of prison to go straight.

What to do about these increases in crime? Plenty of laws already exist to punish violent criminals, and research questions the level of correlation between longer sentences and lower crime rates.