The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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.
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.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
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.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
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.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
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.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
