The sentence belongs to the French criminologist Alexandre Lacassagne. Havelock Ellis put it into English in The Criminal (1890) — “every society has the criminals that it deserves” — and Emma Goldman quoted Ellis, inside quotation marks and with a footnote, in her 1910 essay “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure.” The quotation marks fell off; her name stayed on. The popular wording — “gets all the criminals” — matches neither Ellis nor Goldman.
“A society gets all the criminals it deserves” Alexandre Lacassagne, quoted in Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (New York: Scribner & Welford, 1890), chap. 1: "every society has the criminals that it deserves." Emma Goldman quoted Ellis in "Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure," Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) — the line is not hers. — quotle.info
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Provenance
The documented source
Documented in
The Criminal
Author
Havelock Ellis, quoting Alexandre Lacassagne
First published
1890 — Walter Scott, London; Scribner & Welford, New York
Wording
Ellis’s English wording, quoting Lacassagne — he gives no French text and no translator note
Society prepares crimes, as Quetelet said; the criminal is the instrument that executes them. “The social environment,” Lacassagne has well said, “is the cultivation medium of criminality; the criminal is the microbe, an element which only becomes important when it finds the medium which causes it to ferment: every society has the criminals that it deserves.”
The Criminal (1890), ch. I
Goldman reproduces Ellis’s sentence almost exactly — her 1910 text drops the “that” and emphasises the closing clause, with a footnote reading simply “THE CRIMINAL.” The popular modern form, “A society gets all the criminals it deserves,” matches neither text.
1890 — into English. Havelock Ellis, in chapter I of The Criminal ↗, writes that “Lacassagne has well said” the social environment is the cultivation medium of criminality — closing with “every society has the criminals that it deserves.”
1910 — Goldman quotes Ellis. In “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure,” collected in Anarchism and Other Essays ↗, she names Ellis, names Lacassagne, puts the sentence in quotation marks and footnotes it “THE CRIMINAL.” The essay was reprinted in the 1917 third revised edition.
The French wording.Lacassagne’s biography ↗ records the aphorism in his own language — « la justice flétrit, la prison corrompt et la société a les criminels qu’elle mérite » — but dates it to his 1913 restatement of the thesis (Archives d’anthropologie criminelle, 1913, p. 364). No pre-1890 French printing is cited there, though Ellis’s 1890 “Lacassagne has well said” shows the line was already in circulation.
The name slips.Wikiquote’s Goldman talk page ↗ lists “A society gets all the criminals it deserves” among unsourced quotes and flags it as a misattribution, pointing back through Goldman to Ellis and Lacassagne.
✓Public domain
Both documented texts are comfortably pre-1931 and free of US copyright: Havelock Ellis’s The Criminal was published in 1890, and Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays in 1910 — each is served in full by Project Gutenberg (Ellis #44500 ↗, Goldman #2162 ↗). Ellis’s English wording of Lacassagne is itself from 1890, so that text is public domain too. Note that the popular eight-word variant is a later paraphrase of that public-domain text rather than a passage from any identified work.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Where the credit went wrong
This is a quotation-marks failure rather than an invention. Goldman quoted the line accurately and named her source; the internet kept her name and discarded her citation.
✕
Attributed toEmma Goldman Most common
Quote aggregators list “Every society has the criminals it deserves” under her name — see Goodreads ↗. In her own text she introduces it as something Ellis quotes from Lacassagne and footnotes it “THE CRIMINAL,” as the Project Gutenberg edition ↗ shows.
✕
Attributed toRobert F. Kennedy Second wave
Kennedy wrote “In the words of the old saying, every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves” in The Pursuit of Justice (1964), per Wikiquote ↗. He signposted it as inherited; the signpost is usually dropped.
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Wording“gets all the criminals” Drift
The documented English is “every society has the criminals that it deserves” (Ellis, 1890) and “every society has the criminals it deserves” (Goldman, 1910). Wikiquote ↗ lists the “gets all” form among Goldman quotes nobody has been able to source.
✓Lacassagne coined it, Havelock Ellis translated it in 1890 ↗, and Emma Goldman quoted Ellis in 1910 — correctly, with a footnote she is no longer given credit for.
Context
Why the sentence exists
The line is a shot fired in a real argument. In the 1880s and 1890s European criminology split into two camps: Cesare Lombroso’s Italian school, which held that criminals were a distinct biological type identifiable by skull and face, and Lacassagne’s Lyon school, which held that the decisive variable was the world a person lived in. Lacassagne needed a sentence that made the second position unforgettable, and he built one out of laboratory imagery: the social environment is the culture medium, the criminal is the microbe, and a microbe does nothing at all until it lands in a broth that lets it ferment.
Havelock Ellis carried the aphorism into English in The Criminal (1890), the first comprehensive English account of criminal anthropology. Two decades on, Emma Goldman reached for exactly that passage when she wanted authority for the claim that American prisons were manufacturing the crime they punished — and because her essay was reprinted far more often than Ellis’s textbook, her page became the place most readers met the line.
“The social environment … is the cultivation medium of criminality; the criminal is the microbe.” — Lacassagne, in Ellis’s 1890 rendering
How the wording drifted
Ellis’s 1890 English is “every society has the criminals that it deserves.” Goldman’s 1910 text drops the “that”: “every society has the criminals it deserves.” The version that now circulates on quote sites — “A society gets all the criminals it deserves” — swaps “has” for “gets,” adds “all,” and drops “every.” No printed source we could locate carries that combination.
The aphorism kept moving. Robert F. Kennedy used a further variant in The Pursuit of Justice (1964) — “In the words of the old saying, every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves” — and was careful to flag it as a saying he had inherited rather than coined. He is now widely quoted as its author too.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1843–1924 · French forensic physician & founder of the Lyon school of criminology
Alexandre Lacassagne was a French forensic physician who held the chair of legal medicine at Lyon and founded the journal Archives d’anthropologie criminelle. His Lyon school was the main rival to Cesare Lombroso’s Italian school: where Lombroso read criminality off the body as an inborn type, Lacassagne insisted the decisive factor was the social environment. He argued the point in portable aphorisms — the social milieu as a culture medium, the criminal as the microbe — and those aphorisms travelled far further than the theory behind them.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (New York: Scribner & Welford, 1890), chap. 1, “Introduction,” quoting Alexandre Lacassagne: “every society has the criminals that it deserves.” Quoted in Emma Goldman, “Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure,” in Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘A society gets all the criminals it deserves’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/a-society-gets-all-the-criminals-it-deserves/