Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
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.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
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.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
