Quotes

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.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

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.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

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.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

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.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

A sick person is a prisoner.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.