Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
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.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
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.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
