Quotes About Punishment

A key to understanding why Lockdown America rises today is to consider our present system of punishment, particularly U.S. mass incarceration and police repression, as related to the production of economic wealth in the recent history of the United States.

It is not just solitary confinement, however, that has exposed mass incarceration as generative of torture. Prison overcrowding and unwillingness of the U.S. prison system to commit resources for its burgeoning elderly, who are aging behind bars, also create conditions of torture. Law

U.S. death rows, still displaying over 3,000 persons, are similarly sites of torture. After a person is sentenced to death, he or she is held in situations approximating solitary confinement, sometimes for decades, under prolonged and anguishing anticipation of the state's calculation of an execution date. Judges

Judges' rulings on particular cases of such death row confinement have declared it cruel and unusual, a form of torture, as have international jurists.

If Christians do not act on a solidarity with criminalized populations, locked-down communities, and with others suffering extrajudicial and judicial violence, they themselves, along with many other citizens who think themselves free from the criminal justice system's negative effects, may find themselves easily caught up in the indignities of today's punishment regime, if they are not already.

And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and at all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst punishment."16 For

I lay in bed that night, a first-time drunkard at seven years of age, pondering the punishment I knew would arrive on callused palms. In the forest, as if sensing my plight, wolves howled nocturnal laments. The magnificent lunar lullabies of my lupine brethren wooed me into a deep and cleansing sleep.

Interpreters have imposed on Genesis 3 ideas about sin and disobedience, divine anger, or divine punishment found elsewhere in the Bible.

Pain and grief sawed through Pino. This torment was his punishment, he decided. He bowed his head, understanding that this was between God and . . . The aria of the heartbroken clown echoed in his ears and Anna crumpled and fell again, and again, and . . . in a matter of seconds, his faith in God, in life, in love, and in a better tomorrow drained away to empty

Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

I would have taught her a les­son she wouldn't forget!

I thought you came down right on the side of go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.

Those who wish to punish the current and future generations for the inequities of a generation long gone, and who equate justice with revenge, are the most dangerous people in the world.

The purpose of the law is not to prevent a future offense, but to punish the one actually committed.

I am the punishment of God. If you have not committed sins then God wouldn't have sent me.

Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers.

A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.

To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.

retribution was coming for the stupid, not the smart.

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?

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him. Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.

there is considerably less violence in cultures where people think in terms of human needs than in cultures where people label one another as "good" or "bad" and believe that the "bad" ones deserve to be punished. In