It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
No man should be judge in his own case.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
