Quotes

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

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

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

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

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

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

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

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

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.

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

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

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

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

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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

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

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

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

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

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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.