William Randolph Hearst Quotes
The time for the State to protect himself against the criminal is before the criminal is made. Most criminals are not born, they are made.... What a State really punishes in a criminal is its own neglect, it's own failure to do its duty to the citizens.
William Randolph Hearst, 1863-1951, U.S. Congressman (Democrat, NY), Founder, Independence League Party, Journalist and publisher, Editorial, April 1926
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This interesting historical quotation illustrates the fact that in almost every American generation there are those who believe that society has gone too far in protecting the rights of criminal suspects at the expense of law and order in the general society. This is nothing new. This is a classic argument given by those who would deny a defendant the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The belief that an innocent man has nothing to fear from the police is refuted by the many cases of innocent men being convicted by evidence they have given in the belief that they were innocent, and served long jail sentences only to later be proved by DNA evidence that they could not possibly have been guilty. Since Nott’s day, society has not only found many cases where honest error was made by the police or prosecutors, but many where there was venal prosecutorial misconduct and defendants were jailed even though the authorities were aware of evidence of innocence and kept it secret. There have been a number of these cases where a defendant was on death row and about to be executed when it was found he was innocent. Probably there have been men wrongly executed. See {629444} for a probable example.
This quotation is surprising to many because the National Association of Evangelicals is a very conservative organization which is usually at the right wing of political and social issues. However, religions are generally more complex with nuanced positions compared to political parties. On the issue of Prisons, the National Association of Evangelicals is at the left wing of the political spectrum.
The problem of the person who economically profits from the crimes of others has been with America for many years as this quotation shows. I later example was when in 2011, almost all of the large banks hired people as Vice Presidents and those people in turn falsified information and legal documents in mortgage foreclosures. The higher up bank executives who profited from this illegal activity were never prosecuted by the Obama administration. Similarly, the consumer frauds of securities sales representatives, made fortunes for the stock broker partners who almost always were never criminally prosecuted even though almost all their sales personnel were telling prospective customers the same fraudulent information.
William Randolph Hearst Sr. was an American businessman, newspaper publisher, and politician known for developing the nation's largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism influenced the nation's popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human interest stories. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his wealthy father, Senator George Hearst.
