One crime is everything; two nothing.
No man should be judge in his own case.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
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.
Vices are not crimes.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
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.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
