Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
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.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
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.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
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.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
