Quotes

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

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

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

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

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

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.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

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.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

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

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

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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.