"People behave badly and people are in prison and people are on death row, and there are no excuses for everybody's behavior, but most people are coming from abuse."

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[in 1998] I know my political ideas affect what I write but I've tried to follow the facts wherever they land. Every topic I've written about begins as a question. How do police departments behave? Why do bureaucracies function the way they do? What moral intuitions do people have? How do courts make their decisions? What do blacks want from the political system? I can honestly say I didn't know the answers to those questions when I began looking into them.

— James Q. Wilson