Criminologist Quotes

The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.

Unfortunately, goodness and honor are rather the exception than the rule among exceptional men, not to speak of geniuses.

Cesare Lombroso
Cesare Lombroso
I would suggest that there is a tendency in our society to cloak what amounts to moral or material conflicts behind the mantle of humanitarianism. This is because serious conflicts of interest are inadmissible in a political order which obtains its moral legitimacy by invoking the notion of a widespread consensus of opinion throughout all sections of the population.

The perception of time among these mostly illiterate thirteenth-century inhabitants of Languedoc may at first strike the twentieth-century reader as vague at best. They did not always know exactly how old they were, and their sense of history was strictly local.

They say that even of a good thing you can have too much. But I doubt it. True, such good things as sunbathing, beer, and tobacco may be intemperately pursued to the detriment of their devotees; yet, to my mind, one cannot have too much of a good murder.

It is generally assumed that... register data are more representative than court data, which are the result of a long selective process of complaint, arrest, arraignment and prosecution.

Probably fewer than 2% of handguns and well under 1% of all guns will ever be involved in a violent crime. Thus, the problem of criminal gun violence is concentrated within a very small subset of gun owners, indicating that gun control aimed at the general population faces a serious needle-in-the-haystack problem.

Every ounce of information we can extract from a killer about his mind and methods gives us more ammunition to track the next one.