The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
