The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
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.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
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.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
