Quotes

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Justice renders to every one his due.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

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

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

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.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

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.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

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

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.