The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Vices are not crimes.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
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.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
