Quotes

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

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

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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

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

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.