Quotes

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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.

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.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

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

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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

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.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

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

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

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?

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

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.