Word: swiftness
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...idea that imprisonment "corrects" criminals is a U.S. invention. Before the 18th century, prisons mainly detained debtors and the accused. Punishment itself was swift and to the point. Europeans castrated rapists and cut off thieves' hands; the Puritans put crooks in stocks and whipped blasphemers ?then forgave them...
...never even reported. Since justice is neither swift nor certain, the caught criminal often sees his problem as mere bad luck in a country where "everyone else" gets away with...
GEORGE JACKSON. As a small boy growing up in one of Chicago's black ghettos, Jackson was so intrigued by his first sight of a white skin that he walked up and touched it. His curiosity earned him a swift blow on the head with a baseball bat. Since that time, Jackson, whose brother Jonathan was cut down while leading a raid on the Marin County courthouse last August, has battled white society. For eleven years, Jackson, 29, has served time in California prisons for the $70 robbery of a gas station - 7½ years of that time...
...time of great unrest and turmoil in ancient Judea. Restive under the rule of pagan Rome, the Jews of Palestine in the 1st century A.D. repeatedly defied their conquerors with covert gestures of opposition and open acts of rebellion. The Roman response was usually swift and cruel. Perhaps because he participated in one of these uprisings or committed some other grievous offense in the eyes of Jerusalem's stern rulers, a young Judean named Yehohanan (a Hebrew form of John) was sentenced to death. Like thousands of other Jews-including Jesus of Nazareth -who were also condemned...
This is only a flaw in an icy gem. Petri's calculating direction is too swift and merciless to allow the clutter to become insuperable. Volonte, meanwhile, invests the role of the cold, internally rent inspector with brutal authority, giving credence to the proposition that if justice is blind, so is its terrible opposite...