Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
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.
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.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
