Quotes

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

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.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

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.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.