Criminal Class Quotes

Congress: America's only true criminal class.

How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals.

I'm not from the working class. I'm from the criminal class.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

The effect of every sort of New Deal is to increase and prosper the criminal class. It teaches precisely what all professional criminals believe, to wit, that, it is neither virtuous nor necessary to suffer and to do without.

The average prison term for a convicted murderer in America is 6.5 years. The average tenure for a member of Congress is 13 years. We've got it backwards. We are giving early release to the wrong criminal class.

Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class.

In the first batch of readers, back in the '60s and '70s, the criminal class was still literate, so I would get letters from people in prison; they thought that I was somebody whom they could shop-talk with, and they would tell me very funny stories. I got a lot of those. Guys who were going to wind up doing 10 to 15 for bank robbery, yes, were reading my books.