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.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
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.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
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.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
