The best antidote for crime is justice. The irony we often fail to appreciate is that the more justice people enjoy, the fewer crimes they commit. Crime is the natural offspring of an unjust society.
Interpretation
Justice serves as a powerful remedy against crime, implying that fairness reduces criminal activity.
This quote by Gerry Spence highlights the intrinsic relationship between justice and crime, suggesting that a just society fosters a sense of fairness that ultimately reduces the occurrence of crime. It underlines the irony that when people feel treated equitably, they are less likely to engage in criminal behavior, positioning injustice as the primary catalyst for crime.
In practice
In a debate about criminal justice reform, this quote can emphasize the importance of equity.
Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery.
The erosion of a nation's concern for life and for individual rights, has always preceded the intrusion of tyranny.
The true test of liberty is the right to test it, the right to question it, the right to speak to my neighbors, to grab them by the shoulders and look into their eyes and ask, “Are we free?” I have thought that if we are free, the answer cannot hurt us. And if we are not free, must we not hear the answer?
The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who hold power, in power.
The ultimate enemy of Democracy is not the drug dealer of the crooked politician or the crazed skinhead. The ultimate enemy is the New King that has become so powerful it can murder its own citizens with impunity.
Circumstances of crimes vary. So do motives. And so do prospects for rehabilitation. The number of imponderables makes it impossible to sentence by formula and still sentence justly.
If it be not a sin, an open, flagrant violation of all the rules of justice and humanity, to hold these slaves in bondage, it is indeed folly to put ourselves to any trouble and expense in order to free them.
Environmental injustice is a tangible, intolerable example of an exhibited moral laxity and minimal concern for healthy standards by corporations and political structures based on the race, ethnicity, and class of those being impacted.
Fill the seats of justice with good men, not so absolute in goodness as to forget what human frailty is.
I am more optimistic though, that this court will eventually conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that is - and the death penalty - must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive.
Justice turns the scale, bringing to some learning through suffering.
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