Quotes

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

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.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

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

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

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

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

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

A sick person is a prisoner.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

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