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.
Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.
Justice is not cheap. Justice is not quick. It is not ever finally achieved.
No matter what his crimes were, Alton Sterling did not deserve to be executed for them. Look, guys, the punishment for resisting arrest shouldn't be death. The punishment for selling bootleg CDs shouldn't be death. The punishment for having a gun in an open-carry state shouldn't be death. The punishment for being a black man shouldn't be death.
Of course laws will not eliminate prejudice from the hearts of human beings. But that is no reason to allow prejudice to continue to be enshrined in our laws - to perpetuate injustice through inaction.
Evil never goes unpunished, Monsieur. But the punishment is sometimes secret.
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.
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