Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
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.
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.
No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
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.
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.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
