A sick person is a prisoner.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
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.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
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.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
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.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
