Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
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.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
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?
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
