Quotes About Punishment

Much of their data was unique because it could come only from experiments in which human beings were made to suffer or die. That made Blome a valuable target—but a target for what? Justice cried out for his punishment. From a U.S. Army base in Maryland, however, came an audaciously contrary idea: instead of hanging Blome, let's hire him.

You've got it backward. You're doing it to yourself. Punishing yourself for something you didn't have the power to change. You can't forgive yourself, so you refuse to forgive anybody else.

Castigation is a doom which achieves itself. In punishing yourself, you come to merit punishment.

Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog's repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people's earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive

Crime is one of the many methods justice may select.

The evidence linking increased punishment with lower crime rates is very strong.

Los sesenta y setenta fueron, en retrospectiva, una época fabulosa para ser delincuente callejero en la mayor parte de las ciudades norteamericanas. Las probabilidades de recibir un castigo eran tan bajas —fue la época de auge de un sistema judicial liberal y el movimiento a favor de los derechos del delincuente— que cometer un delito sencillamente no resultaba difícil.

las políticas más exitosas son aquellas que castigan directamente el mal uso, como las sentencias a prisión obligatorias por cualquier crimen que envuelva un arma. En California y en otros lugares, tales medidas han reducido el crimen sustancialmente.

When bad predictions are unpunished, what incentive is there to stop making them?

People see violence as moral, not immoral: across the world and throughout history, more people have been murdered to mete out justice than to satisfy greed.

In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires.

When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.

Most homicides, Black notes, are really instances of capital punishment, with a private citizen as the judge, jury, and executioner.

A regime that trawls for drug users or other petty delinquents will net a certain number of violent people as bycatch, further thinning the ranks of the violent people who remain on the streets. Incarceration

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A

Steven Alm, a judge who devised a "probation with enforcement" program, summed up the reason for the program's success: "When the system isn't consistent and predictable, when people are punished randomly, they think, My probation officer doesn't like me, or, Someone's prejudiced against me, rather than seeing that everyone who breaks a rule is treated equally, in precisely the same way.

When England introduced drop hanging in 1783 and France introduced the guillotine in 1792, it was a moral advance, because an execution that instantly renders the victim unconscious is more humane than one that is designed to prolong his suffering.

between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

The cluster illusion, like other post hoc fallacies in probability, is the source of many superstitions: that bad things happen in threes, people are born under a bad sign, or an annus horribilis means the world is falling apart. When a series of plagues is visited upon us, it does not mean there is a God who is punishing us for our sins or testing our faith. It means there is not a God who is spacing them apart.

Also, a state without an effective police and judiciary had to make a little punishment go a long way.

The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won't punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.

And with an average trial length at the time of eight and a half minutes, it is certain that many of the people sent to the gallows were innocent.67 Rummel estimates that between the time of Jesus and the 20th century, 19 million people were executed for trivial offenses.68

The reason the punishment should fit the crime, for example, is not to balance some mystical scale of justice but to ensure that a wrongdoer stops at a minor crime rather than escalating to a more harmful one.

their lack of empathy imposes no brake on the punishment they mete out to real or imagined opponents. Nor does it allow any consideration of the human costs of another of their DSM symptoms: their "fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love," which may be realized in rapacious conquest, pharaonic construction projects, or utopian master plans. And we have already seen what overconfidence can do in the waging of war.