L. Frank Baum Quotes

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing will deter crime but the certainty of punishment.

We are a humane society, and one which believes that we have to help rehabilitate offenders so they turn away from crime.

To the criminals and all their accomplices, I, today, humbly and as a brother, repeat: convert yourselves to love and justice. It is possible to return to honesty. The tears of the mothers of Naples are asking this of you.

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.

Criminals are punished, that others may be deterred.

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

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

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

Severity of punishment is not the cure for crime. Certainty and promptness of punishment rather than severity are more effective. There was a time, as we all know, when in England considerably more than two hundred separate offenses were punishable by death. Nevertheless, that period was one of the most lawless and violent known to history. The utter failure of the drastic technique in the suppression of crime is universally acknowledged.

A judge who cannot punish, associates himself in the end with the criminal.

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

We spend $94,000 per prisoner [per year]. There is a tension between punishment and making people’s lives better and I don’t actually think that we have done the second part well. We put people in prison and expect them to come out

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

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.

In the long run, a flexible sentencing procedure which works to rehabilitate offenders offers the best hope in the majority of cases in the Federal courts.

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.

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.

Our laws are too lax, our justice system too weak - particularly when it comes to violent, dangerous offenders.

The question is, does the punishment fit the crime? So we're not saying that we shouldn't punish people. We're not talking about a society that tolerates lawlessness. We should be very tough on people who are perpetuating violent crimes, for example. But we should make sure that it's tailored and not arbitrary.