It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
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.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Man is condemned to be free.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
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.
No crime has been without a precedent.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
