The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
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.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
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.
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.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
