Quotes

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

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

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

He who profits by a crime commits it.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

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.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

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.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

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.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Vices are not crimes.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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