“The certainty of punishment, even more than its severity, is the preventive of crime.”
Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian
Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 456.
“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”
— Hannah Arendt, book Eichmann in Jerusalem
Epilogue.
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963)
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Jewish-American political theorist 1906–1975Related quotes
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Context: It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.
But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, "whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection," and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
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