To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
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.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
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.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
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.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
