Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
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.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
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.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
