If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
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.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
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.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
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.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
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.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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 just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Man is condemned to be free.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
