Quotes

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

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.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

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.