Quotes About Punishment For Crime

#1. December, 1865, of the celebrated 13th article or amendment of the Constitution, which declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude - except as a punishment for crime - shall exist within the United States.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#2. Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

Henry Ford

#3. Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.

Elizabeth Fry

#4. To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

#5. The Auschwitz praxis was based on a new principle: for one portion of mankind, existence itself is a crime, punishable by humiliation, torture, and death. And the new world produced by this praxis included two kinds of inhabitants, those who were given the "punishment" and those who administered it.

Emil Fackenheim

#6. Many of the Nazis were convicted after the war, but they were not convicted for being 'unreasonable'. They were convicted for being gruesome murderers.

Jostein Gaarder

#7. There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.

Benjamin Moser

#8. Remorse is the punishment of crime; repentance, its expiation. The former appertains to a tormented conscience; the latter to a soul changed for the better.

Joseph Joubert

#9. Crime and punishment can be summed up in two classifications: there are bad people and there are people who get into bad situations. The lines for liberation and rehabilitation should first begin with the people who get into bad situations.

Johnnie Dent Jr.

#10. Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed?

Woody Allen

#11. The Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution had abolished slavery but allowed one major exception: slavery remained appropriate as punishment for a crime. In

Michelle Alexander

#12. Hearn's death was happily smudged, or at least on the surface, but ever since the second ambush he had been feeling the apprehension of a man in a dream who knows he is guilty, is waiting for his punishment, and cannot remember his crime.

Norman Mailer

#13. he worked with great intensity without sparing himself, & he was respected for this, but no one liked him" --crime & punishment

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#14. And don't miss Frank Otto, the world's most tattooed man! Held hostage in the darkest jungles of Borneo and tried for a crime he didn't commit, and his punishment? Well, folks, his punishment is written all over his body in permanent ink!

Sara Gruen

#15. If life was fair ... one third of the people would comprise of judges and lawyers ... one third of police and prison officials ... and one third of legislators ... and one third more to make the other three thirds make any sense at all .... Thank goodness for no fair.

Brian Spellman

#16. Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.

Emmeline Pankhurst

#17. Why does crime, even when as powerful as Caesar, and assured of being beyond punishment, strive always for the appearances of truth, justice, and virtue? Why does it take the trouble?

Henryk Sienkiewicz

#18. The fact is, in the minds of many, Trayvon Martin received the appropriate punishment for a true crime: He was black, male and dared to walk outside. In life, young Trayvon was just a teenager; in death, he has been transformed into a scary, lurking, suspicious, prone-to-violence spook.

Henry Rollins

#19. Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime.

John Stuart Mill

#20. " You think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth." --Crime and punishment, F. Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#21. The real truth is, the number of convicts is too overwhelming for the means of proper and effectual punishment. I despair of any remedy but that which I wish I could hope for - a great reduction in the amount of crime.

Robert Peel

#22. They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.

Arundhati Roy

#23. Obviously, people who commit crimes should be punished. Even people who steal socks and 'Snow White' videos should probably do time if they have priors, especially serious priors. But the punishment has to fit the crime, and the standard has to be the same for everyone.

Matt Taibbi

#24. We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

#25. Vice may triumph for a time, crime may flaunt its victories in the face of honest toilers, but in the end the law will follow the wrong-doer to a bitter fate, and dishonor and punishment will be the portion of those who sin.

Allan Pinkerton

#26. but the crime is more important than the punishment. I enliven all of me in my happy instinct for destruction.

Clarice Lispector

#27. Crimes against children are the most heinous crime. That, for me, would be a reason for capital punishment because children are innocent and need the guidance of an adult society.

Clint Eastwood

#28. Let someone who was not from among the convicts try reproaching a prisoner for his crime and abusing him (though it's not in the Russian spirit to reproach a criminal)
there would be no end of cursing.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#29. If the same punishment is prescribed for two crimes that injure society in different degrees, then men will face no stronger deterrent from committing the greater crime if they find it in their advantage to do so.

Cesare Beccaria

#30. A big moment for me was when I did a play that was a new adaptation of Dostojevskij's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I played Raskolnikov. It was actually the first thing I did when I got out of acting school.

Joel Kinnaman

#31. Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

John Ruskin

#32. The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime
for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold.

Marquis De Sade

#33. One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem on others.

Juvenal

#34. Crack had a social logic to it, a specific kind of reasoning that drew from a vast well of common experience for its symbolic resonance. Crack stood for pain and power, chaos and order, the truth behind the lie. Crack was a sociolegal logic grounded in blood.

Dimitri A. Bogazianos

#35. We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender, we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.

Potter Stewart

#36. For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes.

Cesare Beccaria

#37. Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?

Marquis De Sade

#38. If you are sentenced to torture for a crime, yes, that is a cruel punishment. But the mere fact that somebody is tortured is - is unlawful under - under our statutes, but the Constitution happens not to address it, just as it does not address a lot of other horrible things.

Antonin Scalia

#39. If a deadly snake slithering around in a pre-school bit a child, would you box it up for a month as punishment, and then release it to prey upon the children once again?

Edward M. Wolfe