Quotes About Punishment

People who commit crimes should be responsible for those crimes. It doesn't matter whether they're priests or ministers or atheists.

I never went to church. The priests couldn't scare me with all that crap about hell, but somehow I knew, inside of me somehow, I knew that I'd pay for it.

Retributive justice did not arise from any Christian principle; almost every pre-Christian society dealt with wrongdoers by causing them pain.

Going to prison is like dying with your eyes open.

The last place I would ever want to go is prison.

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

Keeping a guy in prison costs 50,000 bucks a year. Executing one costs a couple million.

Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves.

Prison is not meant to be comfortable. It's not meant to be somewhere anyone would ever want to go back to.

Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history.

It doesn't help to fight crime to put people in prison who are innocent.

You can't be sent away to prison for life and feel OK about it.

The Federal prison population has increased more than 7-fold over the past 20 years.

We make no apology for people who should be in prison being in prison.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

We can't let somebody rise to the top who will pardon these war criminals. Because they need to go to prison for what they've done in this world. We can't have a pardon. They need to pay for what they've done.

I went to prison, I paid my bill.

I believe, and I may be wrong, the system sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate, but they don't do that in a lot of cases.

Prison works.

I've never been in prison. I've been in jail a lot. But I've never actually been sentenced to anything.

How come we never use prison, the failure of prison, as a reason not to give more prison? There's never a moment where we say, 'OK, well, prison hasn't worked, so we're not going to try that again.'

For the offenders completing these short sentences whose lives are destabilised, and for society which incurs a heavy financial and social cost, prison simply isn't working.

I have always believed prison can be very, very good for you but not by the act of deprivation of liberty alone. There has to be more to life inside than that.

What we have to do is make sure there are prison places for those sent to prison by the courts and we will continue to do that regardless of how many people are sent to prison.