Quotes

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 English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

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.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

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

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

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Justice renders to every one his due.

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

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

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.