Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
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.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
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.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
No man should be judge in his own case.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Justice renders to every one his due.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
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.
