Justice renders to every one his due.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Man is condemned to be free.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
