Quotes

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

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.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Vices are not crimes.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.