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.
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.
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.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
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.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
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.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
