Quotes

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

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

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

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

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

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

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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

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.

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