Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
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.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
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.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
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.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Justice renders to every one his due.
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.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
