When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
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.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
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.
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.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
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.
