While crime is punished it yet increases.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
A sick person is a prisoner.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.