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.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
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.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
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.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
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.
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.
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.
