Quotes

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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.

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

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

A sick person is a prisoner.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

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.

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

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

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.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

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

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

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.