Victoria Woodhull Quotes

Negro children are still sent to prison with adult criminals, and that they leave it half devil and half beast.

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

Punishment can do a lot for criminals, and send a message to the rest of society.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

I've always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I've always been touched by the idea of criminality.

I love criminal law. It must be the Dostoyevskian streak in me. I'm fascinated by the accumulation of forces that make people behave in ways that everybody else hates.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

Crime is contagious.

Court rules do not cause crime.

We're recycling very dangerous criminals over and over again.

Bad people should be incarcerated.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes…. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

Mutilations of parts of Fingers, are proper to disable such as have abused their dexterous use of them, by Pocket-picking, Counterfeiting of Seals and Writings, etc. Mutilations of other parts, may serve to punish and prevent Adulteries, Rapes, Incests, etc. And the smaller Corporal pains, serve to punish those, who can pay no pecuniary mulcts.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted; and by which, during that term, a portion of the prison employment shall be for, and the product thereof be faithfully paid over to, the support of the criminal’s family; and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

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

Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries.

Our criminal institutions are full of creeps like you who do wrong things, and many of them were driven to these crimes by the horrible force called music.

The criminal left belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary.

atrophy of feeling creates criminals.

If the people would but analyze the human equation of a prison they might better account for the crimes that are visited upon them in cities, towns, and hamlets, ofttimes by men who graduated with an education and equipment for just that sort of retributive service from some penal institution.

The true criminal must be defined as a man who commits a crime though he is as decently fed and clothed as others.

I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

Criminals thrive on the indulgence of society’s understanding.

For 30 years I have tried to make it understood that there are no criminals.

Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.