A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
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.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
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.
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.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
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.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
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.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
