Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
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 hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Justice renders to every one his due.
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.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Vices are not crimes.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
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.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
