The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
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.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Vices are not crimes.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
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.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
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 refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
We are prisoners of ideas.
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.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
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.
