Quotes

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

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

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Justice renders to every one his due.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

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

Vices are not crimes.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

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.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

We are prisoners of ideas.