penal policy Quotes

If people are being upstanding citizens of the Republic, then you have to widen the net to incarcerate them. This explains why America's prisons are full of nonviolent offenders - a perfect example of American exceptionalism.

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

Americans like to humiliate wrongdoers...We like, in short, to punish. It makes us feel good. By every conceivable metric - arrests, prosecutions, duration of sentences, conditions of imprisonment - the United States is by far the most punitive rich democracy.

Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.

All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Penology...has become torture and foolishness, a waste of money and a cause of crime...a blotting out of sight and heightening of social anxiety.

Liberals are people who think that being tough on crime means longer suspended sentences.

I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.

Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns.

Punishment as punishment is not admissible unless the offender has had the freewill to select his course.