Leo Tolstoy

“ Science solved a thousand and one various abstruse, complicated questions bearing on criminal law, but failed to give an answer to the question he had formed. His question was very simple: Why and by what right do some people confine, torture, exile, flog and kill other people no different than they are themselves? ”

“ Among these the percentage of those who resisted interference with their affairs, or were sentenced for resisting the authorities, was very large.
The fifth class, finally, was composed of people who were more sinned against by society than they sinned themselves. These were the helpless people, blunted by constant oppression and temptation, like that boy with the mats, and hundreds of others whom Nekhludoff saw both in and out of prison, and the conditions of those whose lives systematically drove them to the necessity of committing those acts which are called crimes. ”

“ Among these Nekhludoff found, on close acquaintance, those spoiled and depraved people whom the new school calls the criminal type, and the existence of which in society is given as the reason for the necessity of criminal law and punishment. These so-called depraved types, deviating from the normal, were, according to Nekhludoff, none other than those very people who have sinned less against society than society has sinned against them, and against whom society has sinned, not directly, but through their ancestors. ”