One crime is everything; two nothing.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
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.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
