Quotes

No man should be judge in his own case.

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

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

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

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

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

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.

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.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

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

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