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.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
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.
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.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
We are prisoners of ideas.
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.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
