Quotes

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

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.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

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

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

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

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

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

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.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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.