Quotes

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

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.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

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

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.