Quotes

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

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

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

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.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

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.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.