Quotes

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.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

No man should be judge in his own case.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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

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

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

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.

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

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

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.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

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

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.

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

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.

We are prisoners of ideas.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

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

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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

Vices are not crimes.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.