If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
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.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
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.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
