Quotes

A sick person is a prisoner.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

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.

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 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.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.