The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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?
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
