I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
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.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Man is condemned to be free.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
