Quotes

He who profits by a crime commits it.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

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

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

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.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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

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

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

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.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

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

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

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

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.