Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
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.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
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.
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.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
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.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
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.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
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.
