The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
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.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
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.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
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.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
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?
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
