Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
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.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
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.
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.
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.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
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.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
