The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
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.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
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.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
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.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
