One crime is everything; two nothing.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
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.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
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.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
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.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
