Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
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.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
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.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
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.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
