Quotes

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

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

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

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

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

We are prisoners of ideas.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

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

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

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.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.