When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
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.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.
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.”
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
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.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
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.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
