What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
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.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
