Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
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 severest justice may not always be the best policy.
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.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Fast closed with double grills And triple gates–the cell To wicked souls is hell; But to a mind that's innocent 'Tis only iron, wood and stone.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
We are prisoners of ideas.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
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%.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
