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.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
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.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
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.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
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.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
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.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
A sick person is a prisoner.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Justice renders to every one his due.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
