No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
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.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
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
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
