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.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
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.
Vices are not crimes.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
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.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
No man should be judge in his own case.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.
