Punishment Failure Quotes

No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. ... I fell morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

I feel morally and intellectually required to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

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

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

The end result of positively reinforcing bad behavior is that you get more of it. The culmination of a failure to punish predators is a debased, dissolute, slum-dog society in which, by legal decree, the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper.

I was a devil of a scapegrace in my time.... Father racked his head for days together to find a punishment that I should remember; but it was all no good... bread and water was a welcome change to me from the everyday monotony of potatoes and bread-and-butter. After a sound drubbing followed by half a day’s fasting, I felt more like laughing than like crying; and, in half a while, all was forgotten and my wickedness began afresh and worse than ever.

Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences? Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.