Quotes

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

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.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

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

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

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.

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

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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