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.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
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.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
