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"The inescapable conclusion is that society secretly wants crime, needs crime, and gains definite satisfactions from the present mishandling of it! We condemn crime; we punish offenders for it; but we need it. The crime and punishment ritual is a part of our lives. We need crimes to wonder at, to enjoy vicariously, to discuss and speculate about, and to publicly deplore. We need criminals to identify ourselves with, to secretly envy, and to stoutly punish. Criminals represent our alter egos—our 'bad' selves—rejected and projected. They do for us the forbidden, illegal things we wish to do and, like scapegoats of old, they bear the burdens of our displaced guilt and punishment—'the iniquities of us all.'" Karl Menninger   "Unlike the more gimmicky theories of the crime decline, massive imprisonment is almost certain to lower crime rates because the mechanism by which it operates has so few moving parts. Imprisonment physically removes the most crime-prone individuals from the streets, incapacitating them and subtracting the crimes they would have committed from the statistics. Incarceration is especially effective when a small number of individuals commit a large number of crimes. A classic study of criminal records in Philadelphia, for example, found that 6 percent of the young male population committed more than half the offenses. The people who commit the most crimes expose themselves to the most opportunities to get caught, and so they are the ones most likely to be skimmed off and sent to jail. Moreover, people who commit violent crimes get into trouble in other ways, because they tend to favor instant gratification over long-term benefits. They are more likely to drop out of school, quit work, get into accidents, provoke fights, engage in petty theft and vandalism, and abuse alcohol and drugs. 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." Steven Pinker   "The individual robber in a populous society obtains such a narrow or minute share of any loss or gain to society that he ignores the damage his thievery does to society. By contrast, the Mafia family that monopolizes crime in a community has, because of this monopoly, a moderately encompassing interest or stake in the income of that community, so it takes the interest of the community into account in using its coercive power. Whereas the individual criminal in a populous society bears only a minuscule share of the social loss from his crime, the gang with a secure monopoly on crime in a neighborhood obtains a significant fraction of the total income of the community from its protection tax theft. Because of the encompassing interest in the income of society that this monopoly gives, it bears a significant fraction of social losses, including those from its own protection tax theft. Therefore, though the individual criminal normally takes all of the money in the wallet he steals, the secure and rational Mafia leader never sets a protection tax rate anywhere near 100 percent: this would reduce the neighborhood's income so much that the Mafia family itself would be a net loser." Mancur Olson   "With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm—in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself." Robert Jackson   "By assigning two white men to kidnap Kunta Kinte, Haley wasn't just distorting African history (in which the majority of slaves were captured and sold to whites by blacks); he was juggling European archetypes, borrowing Western literary themes meant to appeal to whites as well as blacks. He formulated sub-Saharan Africa's diffuse cultural attitudes into a Western myth of 'exile' or 'pilgrimage' for a black American audience that had internalized such notions from the Old Testament and for other Americans who needed to understand, in both Christian and Enlightenment terms, what their own forebears had perpetrated or suborned. But the African slaves had no signs that an African god was punishing them for their sins with an exile like that of the Jews, or blessing their 'errand into the wilderness' like that of the Puritans. Roots wasn't a product of its protagonists' own mother culture; it was the work of a thoroughly Western, Christian, American writer who took as much from Hebrews and Puritans as from Africans. The novel is a Western account of a monstrous Western crime—a crime only according to Western religious and political standards—that triumphed later to abolish slavery, as no African authority had done and as the Sudan hasn't done yet." Jim Sleeper   "In one famous study, 500 boys from a Massachusetts reform school were tracked from age 17 into retirement. The study shows that getting married cuts a man's chances of committing a crime by half, both for property crimes like burglary, theft, and robbery and for violent crimes like assault and battery. Across all crimes, marriage cuts the rate by 35 percent. If guys had a 'good' marriage, they were even less likely to commit a crime. Remember, we are comparing individuals with themselves during different periods of their lives, so nothing about the person himself explains these effects." Joseph Henrich   "Former president Jimmy Carter was, at the time of the original fatwa, the most prominent American to suggest that the crime of murder should be balanced against Rushdie's crime of blasphemy. The ayatollah's death sentence 'caused writers and public officials in Western nations to become almost exclusively preoccupied with the author's rights,' Carter wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. Well, yes. Carter did not only say that many Muslims were offended and wished violence on Rushdie; that was simply a matter of fact, reported frequently in the news pages. He took to the op-ed page to add his view that these fanatics had a point. 'While Rushdie's First Amendment freedoms are important,' he wrote, 'we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.' Never mind that millions of Muslims take no offense at all, and are insulted by the implication that they should." Don Williams   "A report commissioned by the German government and released at the start of this year found that a double-digit increase in violent crime had occurred in the years since 2015 and that 'more than 90 per cent' of this was due to young male migrants. Three years ago if you said that a huge influx of young male migrants from the developing world might cause an increase in violent crime you would be dismissed as a racist. Today it is clear that—whether you were a racist or not—you also were right in your prediction. Is it wise to depict accurate predictions as racist?" Douglas Murray   "War is waged by men; not by beasts, or by gods. It is a peculiarly human activity. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss at least half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime. That raises a moral question, the kind of problem with which the present age is disinclined to deal." Frederick Manning   "Criminal behaviour is remarkably concentrated; in Sweden, 1 per cent of the population commits 63 per cent of all violent crime, while in England and Wales 50 per cent of all prison sentences are handed out to offenders with at least 15 previous convictions. This concentration means that the best ways to prevent crime are remarkably straightforward: put police out on the beat, give them adequate resources to find criminals, and then lock those criminals away so they can't reoffend." Sam Ashworth-Hayes   "Black Americans accounted for 65.6 percent of the increase in homicide victims in 2020, though only representing about 13 percent of the population. Sylvia Bennett-Stone, director of Voices of Black Mothers United, says, 'We have seen a rise in Black children killed in crossfire. I have never had so many calls from young mothers who have lost babies or children barely out of diapers.' A 2021 USA Today poll of Detroit residents found that 24 percent of black residents viewed crime as the biggest issue facing the city, while only 3 percent named police reform. Among white residents, however, 12 percent were most concerned with police reform compared with 10 percent for crime." Rav Arora   "A famous study that tracked a thousand low-income Boston teenagers for forty-five years discovered that two factors predicted whether a delinquent would go on to avoid a life of crime: getting a stable job, and marrying a woman he cared about and supporting her and her children. The effect of marriage was substantial: three-quarters of the bachelors, but only a third of the husbands, went on to commit more crimes. This difference alone cannot tell us whether marriage keeps men away from crime or career criminals are less likely to get married, but the sociologists Robert Sampson, John Laub, and Christopher Wimer have shown that marriage really does seem to be a pacifying cause. When they held constant all the factors that typically push men into marriage, they found that actually getting married made a man less likely to commit crimes immediately thereafter." Steven Pinker   "By 1992, as more violent offenders were incarcerated, the trajectory of violent crime started falling for the first time in decades. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush continued these policies, and from 1991 to 2013, the total prison population in the U.S. doubled—from roughly 800,000 to 1.6 million. At the same time, violent crime plummeted, dropping for 23 years. By 2014 it had been cut in half—to a level not seen since 1970—and homicides of black victims were down by about 5,000 a year." Bill Barr   "The love for slave property was swallowing up every other mercenary passion. Its ownership betokened not only the possession of wealth but indicated the gentleman of leisure who was above and scorned labor. These things Mr Lincoln regarded as highly seductive to the thoughtless and giddy-headed young men who looked upon work as vulgar and ungentlemanly. Mr Lincoln was really excited and said with great earnestness that this spirit ought to be met and if possible checked; that slavery was a great and crying injustice, an enormous national crime, and that we could not expect to escape punishment for it. I asked him how he would proceed in his efforts to check the speed of slavery. He confessed that he did not see his way clearly. I think he made up his mind from that time that he would oppose slavery actively. I know that Mr Lincoln always contended that no man had any right, other than mere brute force gave him, to a slave. He used to say that it was singular that the courts would hold that a man never lost his right to his property that had been stolen from him but that he instantly lost his right to himself if he was stolen." Joseph Gillespie   "The Argentine, unlike the Americans of the North and almost all Europeans, does not identify with the State. This is attributable to the circumstance that the governments in this country tend to be awful, or to the general fact that the State is an inconceivable abstraction. One thing is certain: the Argentine is an individual, not a citizen. Aphorisms such as Hegel's 'the State is the reality of a moral idea' strike him as sinister jokes. The State is impersonal; the Argentine can only conceive of personal relations. Therefore, to him, robbing public funds is not a crime. I am noting a fact; I am not justifying or excusing it." Jorge Luis Borges   "Novels show the overwhelming intricacy of things: contingencies eluding any pattern, idiosyncrasies baffling all psychological theories, and moral subtleties beyond the reach of any ideology. If the hero of a realist novel should embrace a theory as the key to ethics or politics, he is sure to find himself in a situation more complicated than his theory allows. He encounters what might be called the irony of outcomes, and the story of that encounter is the masterplot of ideological novels as different as Turgenev's Fathers and Children, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Conrad's The Secret Agent, and James's The Princess Casamassima. They all demonstrate the superiority of a fine discrimination of moral particulars not just to one but to any possible theory." Gary Saul Morson   "The question is: Why were young Germans so taken with Agnoli's critique of parliamentarianism, a critique which had its roots—both in terms of content and biography—in Fascism. And why we disregarded the warnings of Richard Löwenthal, Ralf Dahrendorf and others. And why today no one knows that 1968 was the year in which the most Nazi war crime trials were held in the history of the Federal Republic, and the most life sentences handed down. Thirty huge trials ended in 1968, and 23 life sentences were issued. Also close to 3,000 new investigations were launched in 1968. But the student movement didn't talk about those things. There were no teach-ins about them, no articles about them published in the periodicals of the radical left. There was open talk about Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen. Articles about these matters appeared in the newspapers every day, and about the attempted gassings by the Reichskriminalpolizei. The students weren't interested." Götz Aly   "When I was working as a prosecutor in Oakland, California, where there are large numbers of African Americans, I used to see an example of the pervasiveness of this myth in action. When I would be prosecuting a young African American offender for assault or robbery, for example, time and again an inexperienced public defender would ensure that there were African American men and women on the jury, thinking they would be sympathetic to their client because of race. Well, as the prosecutor, that suited me just fine. What I knew to be true is that most African Americans of any economic class, like most people, are deeply offended and angry about crime in their neighborhoods. But these public defenders ended up being shocked that the jurors didn't align with the knucklehead who robbed a gas station or provoked a street-corner brawl. It was no surprise to me." Kamala Harris   "Virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy, unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders—all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty. The majority of prisoners, juvenile detention inmates, high school drop outs, pregnant teenagers, adolescent murderers, and rapists come from a fatherless home." Stephen Baskerville   "An old man, dressed in a white peasant smock, like Tolstoy, stepped out and said he wanted to speak. At once the others attempted to hustle and scold him back into the group. He stood his ground, said he had to speak to us. A silence. Oksana was clearly frightened. The old man spoke. Oksana interpreted, and Douglas Young, our Russian speaker, stopped her. 'No, you are not interpreting properly,' he said, blandly, like a professor. The old man addressed him, and Douglas interpreted, while Oksana squeezed her hands together, as if she were praying. 'You must not believe what you are told. Visitors from abroad are told lies.You must not believe what you are shown. Our lives are terrible. The Russian people—I am speaking for the Russian people. You must go back to Britain and tell everybody what I am saying. Communism is terrible—' And he was pulled back by the others and surrounded, but he stood among them with his burning eyes fixed on us, while the others scolded him. That was remarkable—they scolded and fussed at him; they didn't shrink away from a pariah. And throughout the long, toast-filled meal that followed, he sat silent, his eyes on us, while they scolded—affectionately, there was no doubt about that. Yet at that time people vanished into the Gulag for much less than what he had done. No crime could be worse than to say such things to foreigners. He would be arrested and disposed of, and he knew that this would happen." Doris Lessing