Hugo Black Quotes

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.

Every first year law student learns that sentencing has four goals: retribution, incapicitation, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.

Criminals are punished, that others may be deterred.

Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment.

The end of punishment, therefore, is no other than to prevent the criminal from doing further injury to society, and to prevent others from committing the like offence. Such punishments, therefore, and such a mode of inflicting them, ought to be chosen, as will make the strongest and most lasting impressions on the minds of others, with the least torment to the body of the criminal

Locking people up without reducing the risk of them committing new crimes against new victims the minute they get out does not make for intelligent sentencing.

I believe the public therefore expect the justice system to focus on rehabilitation to reduce the risk of subsequent offending - and the likelihood of them becoming a victim of crime.

The cure for crime is not the electric chair, but the high chair.

America's criminal justice system isn't known for rehabilitation. I'm not sure that, as a society, we are even interested in that concept anymore.

I should not regret a fair and full trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment.

'Getting smart on crime' does not mean reducing sentences or punishments for crimes.

I strongly believe that for serious and violent criminals, we must absolutely hold them accountable for their crimes and send them to prison.

I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them…

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

The purpose of punishment is fulfilled, crime is repressed by penalties of just, not tormenting, severity, its repetition is prevented, and hope is given for the reformation of the criminal.

Severity of punishment is not the cure for crime. Certainty and promptness of punishment rather than severity are more effective. There was a time, as we all know, when in England considerably more than two hundred separate offenses were punishable by death. Nevertheless, that period was one of the most lawless and violent known to history. The utter failure of the drastic technique in the suppression of crime is universally acknowledged.

Every punishment is based, not on logic or the feeling of justice, but on the desire to wish evil on those who have done evil to you or to another person…. Everything about our present system of punishments and about all criminal law will be thought of by future generations in the same way that we think of cannibalism or human sacrifice to the pagan gods. “How did they not see the uselessness and cruelty of those things which they did?” our descendants will say about us.

But passing by all other considerations, and contemplating merely the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them.

Unfortunately, if the man who leaves the prison gates is just as likely or - as is sometimes grievously the case - more likely to offend as he was when he entered them, then we fail not only the individual but public safety as well.

Our justice system is a punitive one that's there to sort of deal with what happens after someone's already offended.

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

Too much mercy... often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second.

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

There's a simple way to solve the crime problem: obey the law; punish those who do not.