Seneca the Younger Quotes

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

Crime, to the man of the forties, was an alien monstrous terror.

Crime and the fear of crime have permeated the fabric of American life.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy.

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

Crime is the number one problem in Russia.

Crime is contagious.

Bad people should be incarcerated.

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.

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 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.

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

When you criminalize something, only criminals can deal with it. When criminals deal with it, there's no recourse to law, so there's only recourse to violence.

He who leaves a fault unpunished invites crime.

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

If it wasn't for prison, I was in a bad way.

People want to kill people because they don't want them out on the street again.

Court rules do not cause crime.

The most malign of all these dangers today is disregard and disobedience of law. Crime is increasing. Confidence in rigid and speedy justice is decreasing.

Obviously crime pays, or there would be no crime.

The more laws the more offenders

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

I'd rather lock somebody up and throw away the key and put them in hard labor, the ultimate penalty that the law will allow, but I'm opposed to the death penalty

Where crime exists, force must exist to repress it. Who denies it? Certainly not Liberty; certainly not the Anarchists … we are the sternest enemies of invasion of person and property, and, although chiefly busy in destroying the causes thereof, have no scruples against such heroic treatment of its immediate manifestations as circumstances and wisdom may dictate

I gathered, in the investigation I made as Chairman of the Committee of the American Law Institute, statistics from a majority of the States and I have carefully examined those gathered by other committees and commissions, and it is my judgment that of those committing major crimes … not one out of every ten is apprehended and adequately punished … that our system of apprehending and prosecuting those who commit major crimes is only from 10 per cent to 15 per cent efficient; that as to those apprehended and indicted for major offenses, it is only from 25 per cent to 30 per cent efficient … and that as to those actually tried for major offenses, it is not over 50 per cent efficient.