Quotes

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Justice renders to every one his due.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

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.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

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

Crimes generally punish themselves.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

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

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

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.

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.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

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

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.

Man is condemned to be free.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

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