Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
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.”
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
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.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
