Quotes about punishment

The peculiarity of punishment of this kind, in which what is pitiless, that is to say, what is brutalizing, predominates, is to transform little be little, by a slow stupefactions, a man into an animal, sometimes into a wild beast.

Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community. I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.

We may add that frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or remissness on the part of the government.

In a well-governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitudes of crimes is a guarantee of impunity.

You kill men for the wrongs they have done, not the wrongs that they may do someday.

Against men habituated to lawless force, violent punishment failed to bring the violence under control.

Every period in history has its own punishments, and ours has a multitude.

To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation, is the sentiment of a barbarian; civilisation and science are calculated to explode so ferocious an idea. It was once universally admitted and approved; it is now necessarily upon the decline.

Until we in the community have made up our minds that what we really want is expiation, or removal, or reform, or or the discouragement of potential criminals, we shall get none of these, but only a confusion in which crime breeds more crime.

What! out of senseless Nothing to provoke

A conscious Something to resent the yoke

Of unpermitted Pleasure, under pain

Of Everlasting Penalties, if broke!

She concluded: “Legalization would drive prices down, crime would stop, then we could take care of the addicts...”

“And you do not do this because of...politics?”

The Secretary of State said, “The war against drugs is big business. Thousands of people are on the payroll. The people on the payroll don’t want the problem solved, though they can’t say that out loud or, perhaps, even admit it to themselves. Instead, they continue to take a moral position that requires them to punish people. Punishing people is always considered moral.”

“Punishment is not my business,” said Questioner. “As I have said to others, it never works anyhow. Putting right is my business.

Unfortunately, when things are put right, often the innocent suffer with the guilty.”

By committing a crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations which bind every human being to every other one. Punishment alone can weld him back again; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part; otherwise only partially so. Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by law.

The need for punishment is not satisfied where, as is generally the case, the penal code is merely a method of exercising pressure through fear.