He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
A sick person is a prisoner.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
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.
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 virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
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.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
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.
