To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
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.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages 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.
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.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
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.
The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
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.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
