Quotes

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.