Quotes

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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.

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

No man should be judge in his own case.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

No crime has been without a precedent.

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

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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

Man is condemned to be free.

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

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

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 not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.