The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
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.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
