Quotes

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

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 real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

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

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

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.

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.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

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

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.

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

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

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.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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.

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