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What has too often happened in the past is that people have threatened punishment but have failed to carry it out. It's imperative in any initiative that is undertaken that punishment be real and that there be truth in sentencing, and that the truly dangerous offenders - the recidivists and the career criminals - be put away and kept away.

Execution as punishment is barbaric and unnecessary.

I don't agree with capital punishment as it is now, because too often mistakes are made. But I think that if you eliminate the mistakes, then there are times when it is justified.

The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy.

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.

Perpetrators absolve their harmful behavior as serving worthy causes.

It is our responsibility to explain to the public how an often unpredictable system of justice is one that serves a productive, civilized, but always evolving, society.

There is one, and only one, thing in modern society more hideous than crime namely, repressive justice.