Criminology 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.

Learning about crime in great detail forces us to ask ourselves how it happened, how the victims and perpetrators got to that point, how the law works, how the police force functions.

I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.

Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

I read true crime books, and I read when people do case studies of stuff. I'm into books like that. Case studies or forensics or murder - all that good stuff.

I have sometimes thought that the laws ought not to punish those actions of evil which are committed when the senses are steeped in intoxication.

Murder is like potato chips: you can't stop with just one.

The political elite prefers to see criminals as victims in need of therapy and TLC.

atrophy of feeling creates criminals.

A society gets the criminals it deserves.

Crime is a product of social excess.

First we pin the convict's badge on him: then we examine his case.

Circumstances of crimes vary. So do motives. And so do prospects for rehabilitation. The number of imponderables makes it impossible to sentence by formula and still sentence justly.

I read a book recently by a psychiatrist who was able to interview a few serial killers and she had a thesis on how you could figure these people out. And she thinks that there are things that could tell you whether someone has the potential to do that.

We also had a beautiful feature where the writer used the story of two mentally ill relatives, one of whom killed his dad, to explore the history of how we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, only to re-institutionalize them - but in jails and prisons. There's much more to come.

Violent predators are not like the rest of us. They kill for fun, for sport, for the sake of it. To compare them to animals is an insult to animals. To expect that we can rehabilitate them assumes a will to change.

I read a lot about serial killers.

At one point, I actually, ironically, thought I might go into criminology and work with the FBI.

What most needs explanation is not why some people are criminals, but why most people are not.

No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone

No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide.

I don't really retain much from the first couple semesters of my criminal justice studies.

Different cultures have different predilections for different kinds of crime.