Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
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.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
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.
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.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Vices are not crimes.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
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.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
