What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
No crime has been without a precedent.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
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.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
