Quotes

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

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

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

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

Vices are not crimes.

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

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Justice renders to every one his due.

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.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

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

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

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

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.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.