The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
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.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
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.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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?
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Man is condemned to be free.
