Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
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.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
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 two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
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.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
