No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.
Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?
Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.
Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs though, it's intimate and psychological, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Abscond - to move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.
He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, him not know t, and he's not robbed at all.
We enact many laws that manufacture criminals, and then a few that punish them.
As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.
A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.
or simply:
