Limits to Pain Quotes

“The offender must be able to give something back. But criminals are most often poor people. They have nothing to give. The answers to this are many. It is correct that our prisons are by and large filled with poor people. We let the poor pay with the only commodity that is close to being equally distributed in society: time.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“If pain is too bad to be executed by everybody, and seen by everybody, is it not because it is too bad?”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“In the 1960's, Labour had gained some power, or at least respectability. Spokesmen for the working class - but of course not necessarily coming from that class or belonging there except through ideology - were upset by the exposed inequalities and abuses disguised as treatment. It did not exactly strengthen the credibility of these measures that most receivers of this type of treatment for crime turned out to belong to just those classes supposed to be in political power.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“We know, all of us, that there is more to our lives than markets and calculation. We have friends for friendship, fall in love for no rational reasons, behave as beasts or heroes even when we know it will not profit us.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“We have distant democracy, well suited to a distant penocracy, well suited to serve a large-scale society using taximeters to control the price of all acts.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“Maybe law is closer related to art than most of us are aware of. But art and power do often stand in a strained relationship.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“We have torn down the worst slums. The natural meeting-points for the lumpenproletariat have been eliminated, converted into pleasant, dull, clean blocks for dull, clean, adapted families. In the absence of ghettos for the losers, they gather around the centres of pride. If Harlem and its equivalents did not exist, they would gather outside the Rockefeller Center.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“The liberal state was not all that liberal when it came to the establishment of the external conditions for the free flow of economic entrepreneurship. Roads, railroads and regulating the poor became essential.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy

“Look for alternatives to punishments, not only alternative punishments.”
― Nils Christie, Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy