It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
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.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
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.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
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.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
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!
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
