There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
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 been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
We are prisoners of ideas.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
