Mark Lanegan Quotes

The percentage of Americans in the prison system, has doubled since 1985.

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.

Though Lexington is not a small town, it sometimes feels like one, with circles of acquaintance overlapping once, then again; the person you meet by chance at the library or the pool may turn out to be the best friend of your down-the-street neighbor. Maybe that's why people are so friendly here, so willing to be unhurried.

Justice is expensive in America. There are no Free Passes... You might want to remember this, the next time you get careless and blow off a few Parking Tickets. They will come back to haunt you the next time you see a Cop car in your rear-view mirror.

If you seek violence, we will seek to put you in jail.

The message has to be sent that if you commit a crime there has to be punishment.

Everybody in Detroit knows somebody who is in prison…. In Detroit, most of us are one incident from being locked up.

Pardon one offence and you encourage the commission of many.

All of us have made mistakes in our lives, but only some of us have had to pay for the mistakes. [By going to jail.]

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.

The United States makes up 5 percent of the world’s population yet has 25% of its prison population.

If anything, we have an under-incarceration problem.

The claim that too many criminals are being jailed, that there is over-incarceration, ignores an unfortunate fact: For the vast majority of crimes, a perpetrator is never identified or arrested, let alone prosecuted, convicted and jailed.

You might have two years probation and do good for a whole year, and you make one mistake, and you got to start over.

Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.

What does this system seem designed to do? As I see it, it seems designed to send people right back to prison, which is what happens about 70% of the time.

We all live in a little Village.

Jail and the streets go hand in hand. You can't have one with out the other. They coincide.

Not to punish evil is equivalent to authorizing it.

Boston is large enough to learn your independence and small enough to make your own.

If you do anything well, gratitude is lighter than a feather; if you give offense in anything, people's wrath is as heavy as lead.

You think it doesn't really matter if you screw up this time around because you can just sort it all out in paradise

Over the last few years a lot of people have become aware of the inequities in the criminal justice system, right now, with our overall crime rate and incarceration rate both falling, we're at a moment when some good people in both parties, Republicans and Democrats and folks all across the country, are coming up with ideas to make the system work smarter and better.

The chickens have come home to roast.

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.