Quotes

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

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.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

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.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

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.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.