The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
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.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
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.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
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.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
