Criminal Justice Quotes

“You can’t prosecute criminals in a system that’s run by the same criminals.”
― Jasun Ether, The Beasts of Success

“There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice. (Cambridge University Press (September 29, 1989)”
― Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws

“A president cannot defend a nation if he is not held accountable to its laws.”
― DaShanne Stokes

“[T]here are some human rights that are so deep that we can't negotiate them away. I mean people do heinous, terrible things. But there are basic human rights I believe that every human being has. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations says it for me. And it says there are two basic rights that can't be negotiated that government doesn't give for good behavior and doesn't take away for bad behavior. And it's the right not to be tortured and not to be killed. Because the flip side of this is that then when you say OK we're gonna turn over -- they truly have done heinous things, so now we will turn over to the government now the right to take their life. It involves other people in doing essentially the same kind of act."

(PBS Frontline: Angel on Death Row)”
― Sister Helen Prejean

“Endangering human life for profit should be a universal crime.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called 'state security' in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stalinist past), police and communications are all die-hard Zuma loyalists. Whatever their line functions, they will also play the role they have played so ably to date: keeping Zuma out of court—and making sure the state serves Zuma as it once did Mbeki.”
― Mark Gevisser

“Make a commitment to serve the needs of the ‘least of these’ and give voice to the voiceless.”
― Artika Tyner

“Criminal justice" is what happens after a complicated series of events has gone bad. It is the end result of failure--the failure of a group of people that sometimes includes, but is never limited to, the accused person.”
― Paul Delano Butler, Let's Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice

“American citizens should not lose their constitutional rights because they lack the money to pay for them.”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“There is no greater threat to a free and democratic nation than a government that fails to protect its citizen’s freedom and liberty as aggressively as it pursues justice.”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“Providing adequate representation even for defendants who appear guilty is the best way to protect those who are not.”
― Deborah L Rhode

“No one should ever be wrongfully deprived of their rights to liberty and freedom without just cause, yet in the past 25 years alone thousands of people have been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to tens of thousands of years in prison.”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“The offender must be able to give something back. But criminals are most often poor people. They have nothing to give. The answers to this are many. It is correct that our prisons are by and large filled with poor people. We let the poor pay with the only commodity that is close to being equally distributed in society: time.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system—right here—through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney's Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.'s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow.”
― Tom Wolfe

“In a free and democratic society such as ours, justice should not eternally abrogate one’s rights to freedom and liberty, except in the most extreme cases.”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“Death Penalty' in rarest of rare cases, should adorn criminal justice system in India,which would operate as a detterent mechanism. Abrogation of capital punishment and it's obliteration from the law, would be a great folly. In the human rights perspective, concretising the human rights of the criminal(perpetrator of a particular offense attracting Capital punishment ) by negating Human Rights of the victim is again a murder of justice.”
― Henrietta Newton Martin

“Isn’t Santa just a stand in for the society that has locked them up for formative years? Something that watches and judges, telling them that they got what they deserved based on their behavior? Surely they have to have noticed that Saint Nick, like the judicial system itself, tends to look more favorably upon rich children. He is fat, white, past middle age, and holds all the cards.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, A Creature Was Stirring

“So he is my brother, and yours, too, Carl Schummel, for that matter," answered Peter, looking into Carl's eye. "We cannot say what we might have become under other circumstances. We have been bolstered up from evil since the hour we were born. A happy home and good parents might have made that man a fine fellow instead of what he is. God grant that the law may cure and not crush him!”
― Mary Mapes Dodge, Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates

“An absurd thing for the murderous state to plead for, but, as always, the massive violence of the state was “justice,” was “law and order,” and resistance to perpetual violence was an act of terror.”
― Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars

“Lady justice has a blindfold over her eyes, because she just can't bear to watch what happens”
― Don Winslow, The Force

“It is quick to over punish and uninterested in rewarding good behavior. What would we say about an individual who had these characteristics? Mean? Cruel? Heartless? Mindless? Hypocritical? Stupid?”
― Bernard B. Kerik, From Jailer to Jailed: My Journey from Correction and Police Commissioner to Inmate #84888-054

“Today’s FBI could benefit greatly from a return to the leadership models, cultural traits, and operational practices that made it great. To some degree, these factors were deprioritized, watered down, and sometimes discarded for new-era management approaches embraced by corporate America…” (Excerpt from “Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew).”
― Christopher M Piehota, Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew

“The average man does not wish to employ an ex-convict, because the average man has no confidence in the reforming powers of the penitentiary. He believes that the convict who comes out is worse than the convict who went in.”
― Robert G Ingersoll

“Those who are the fiercest to destroy their fellow men for having committed crimes, are, for the most part, at heart, criminals themselves.”
― Robert G Ingersoll

“Some may be, and probably millions have been, reformed, through kindness, through gratitude--made better in the sunlight of charity. In the atmosphere of kindness the seeds of virtue burst into bud and flower. Cruelty, tyranny, brute force, do not and cannot by any possibility better the heart of man.”
― Robert G Ingersoll

“By suing his former lawyer, Baez’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, said Harvey had waived attorney-client privilege, allowing Tacopina on Baez’s behalf to denounce Harvey as 'a vile fiend' and a 'rapist.”
― Ken Auletta, Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

“It's the golden age of crime, when the biggest cartel of a nation is its own government.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“Mass deportation is human trafficking, but you'd have to have a human heart, unchained by patriotic allegiances, to fathom this. Every genocidal maniac is a patriot, and it's the golden age of crime, when the biggest cartel of a nation is its own government.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“A government that doesn't put criminals in jail is a jail.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Not to punish the criminal is to punish his victim.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov