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.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
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 object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
No man should be judge in his own case.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
