Quotes

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

Justice renders to every one his due.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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.

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.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

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

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.

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

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

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

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

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

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.