Quotes

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

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

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.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

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

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

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

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.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

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

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

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

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

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

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