The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
We are prisoners of ideas.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
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.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
