Ray Davies Quotes

It's time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground, send them all to their maker and he'll settle them down.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

No cruel and unusual punishment is to be inflicted? It is sometimes necessary to hang a man. Villains often deserve whipping and perhaps having their ears cut off. But are we in the future to be prevented from inflicting these punishments because they are cruel?

Capital punishment may not be much of a deterrent against murder, but the sight of a few corpses swinging from a scaffold might work with drug dealers.

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

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.

Somewhere within the concept of justice, the worst of the guilty must always be removed. I cannot divorce this, not completely. The people must have justice and so I want to reinstate and enshrine the blessed and holy guillotine!

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem.

Americans like to humiliate wrongdoers...We like, in short, to punish. It makes us feel good. By every conceivable metric - arrests, prosecutions, duration of sentences, conditions of imprisonment - the United States is by far the most punitive rich democracy.

Crime generally punishes itself.

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

Penalties serve to deter those who are not inclined to commit any crimes.

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

Get jailed, jump bail, join the Army if you fail.

Nothing so upholds the laws as the punishment of persons whose rank is as great as their crime.

Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance.

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him.

The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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.

He must have known me if he had seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face.

Punishment closely follows guilt as its companion.

Nothing can excel a few days in jail for giving a young man or woman a quick education in the basis of industrial society.