Quotes

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.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

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.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

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.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

One crime is everything; two nothing.