Quotes

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

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

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.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

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

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.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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.