A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
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.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
