Crime Quotes

Take a trip in my mindsee all that I've seen,and you'd be called abeast, not a human being...Fuck it, cause there'snot much I can do,there's no way out, myscreams have no voice nomatter how loud I shout...I could be called alow life, but life ain'tas low as me. I'm in juvenile hall headedfor the penitentiary. George Trevino, sixteen, Who Am I?

~ Edward Humes

It's not like they can take anything from me,' he says later, back with his homeboys in Juvenile Hall. 'Ain't got nothing to give. Nothin' but time, that is. And I been doin' time my whole life, one way or the other.

~ Edward Humes

Locking everyone up is not the solution,' she sighs, staring into a cup of coffee gone cold as The Box at Juvenile Hall. 'It's just the symptom of the problem. It's the proof that we're doing something wrong.

~ Edward Humes

False assurances were certainly more harmful than none at all.

~ Chris Womersley

...chance is sometimes a wonderful accomplice in crime.

~ Émile Gaboriau

They do horrible, unchildish things because they they have had very horrible, unchildish lives.

~ Edward Humes

(…)man holds the remedy in his own hands, and lets everything go its own way, simply through cowardice- that is an axiom.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In the half-century of his life, a tick on the Doomsday clock, he had borne witness to the most unbelievable technological advances. He had started off listening to an old Bush radio in the corner of the living room and now he had a phone in his hand on which he could pretend to throw a scrunched-up piece of paper into a waste bin. The world had waited a long time for that.

~ Kate Atkinson

These kids are already hard. They don't need to be made harder. The issue is softening them up. They need to learn how to care about life again. They've lost that. That's what we need to give back to them.

~ Edward Humes

He wants to tell her that he is not hopeless, that he is not filled with hatred or violence, that he is not a number, a 300 or 600 or any hundred, but just a kid with no one and nothing, and who would do anything to make it otherwise. Just tell me how, he wants to scream. He wants to tell her what it's like to have the same dream night after night, that he's playing tag with his little sister, laughing, happy - then waking up and not knowing if the image in his head is a dim memory, or just something his mind cooked up to fill the black hole. Do you know what it's like to have no past? he wants to ask. And behind it all, like a ringing in his ears, is the question that really nags at him all the time, the one that has haunted him since he was six years old and his family evaporated. He wants to ask it, then and there and for good: What did I do wrong back then? What did I do to deserve this life?

~ Edward Humes

the fundamental question Juvenile Court was designed to ask - What's the best way to deal with this individual kid? - is often lost in the process, replaced by a point system that opens the door, or locks it, depending on the qualities of the crime, not the child.

~ Edward Humes

It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

A small demerit extinguishes a long service.

~ Thomas Fuller

And the thing has been said and said well have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

~ Anatole France

Jupiter is slow looking into his notebook but he always looks.

~ Zenobius

The number of malefactors authorizes not the crime.

~ Thomas Fuller

No one is entirely useless. Even the worst of us can serve as horrible examples.

~ Anonymous Prisoner

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.

~ Henry Miller

Fear succeeds crime - it is its punishment.

~ Voltaire

All punishment is mischief. All punishment in itself is evil.

~ Jeremy Bentham

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

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

He only may chastise who loves.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

If England treats her criminals the way she has treated me she doesn't deserve to have any.

~ Oscar Wilde

It is fairly obvious that those who are in favour of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not.

~ Rémy De Gourmont

Prisons don't rehabilitate they don't punish they don't protect so what the hell do they do?

~ Jerry Brown

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

~ Henry Ford

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard chiefly I think because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

~ Bertrand Russell

Much as he is opposed to lawbreaking he is not bigoted about it.

~ Damon Runyon

Crime like virtue has its degrees.

~ Racine

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business?

~ Will Rogers

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

~ George Bernard Shaw

We get the worrywart, the hypochondriac, the money-grubbing miser, the intractable negotiator... Some would say certain of these refer to the stereotypical, or 'stage' Jew. But objectively speaking, the only crime in humor is an unfunny joke.

~ Alan King

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

~ Victor Hugo

If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have.

~ Sebastian Junger

The greatest crime since World War II has been U.S. foreign policy.

~ Ramsey Clark

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

~ James Russell Lowell

Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.

~ James Russell Lowell

The crime of loving is forgetting.

~ Maurice Chevalier

We won't sit idly by when a crime is committed in the real world. So why should we when it happens in cyber space?

~ Max Baucus