Quotes

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

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.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

No man should be judge in his own case.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

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

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

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

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.