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.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
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.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
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.
