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.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
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.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
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.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
