Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
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.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
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.
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.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
