Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
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 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.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Vices are not crimes.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
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.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
