Quotes

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

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. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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?

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.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.