Quotes

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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

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.

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.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

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.

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.

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

Justice renders to every one his due.