The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
A sick person is a prisoner.
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.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
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.
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.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Man is condemned to be free.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
