I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
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.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
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.
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.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
