Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Fast closed with double grills And triple gates–the cell To wicked souls is hell; But to a mind that's innocent 'Tis only iron, wood and stone.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
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.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
