If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
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.
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.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
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.
