Quotes

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

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

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.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

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

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

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

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

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

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.