It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
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 English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
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.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
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.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
