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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
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.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Justice renders to every one his due.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
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.”
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
