Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
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.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
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
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.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
No crime has been without a precedent.
