While crime is punished it yet increases.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
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.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
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.
