Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
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.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
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.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
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.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
