Quotes

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

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

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

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

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

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

Vices are not crimes.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.