Quotes

While crime is punished it yet increases.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

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.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

No man should be judge in his own case.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

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.

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.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.