Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
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.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Vices are not crimes.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
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.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
