The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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 worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
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.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
