Quotes

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

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

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

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.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

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

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

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.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

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

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

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

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.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

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.