Quotes

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

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

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

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.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

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

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

No man should be judge in his own case.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

No crime has been without a precedent.

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

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.