Quotes

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

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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.

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.

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.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

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

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

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.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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.

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.

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.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.