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.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
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.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
If you treat prisoners well, they will be less angry, less inclined to violence inside prison, less likely to provoke violent actions by guards, less likely to have reason to file brutality lawsuits that cost taxpayers a bundle and waste administrators' time. And most important, well-treated prisoners will be less likely to leave prison angrier, more vicious and more inclined to criminal behavior than when they went in.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
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.
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.
When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
We are prisoners of ideas.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
