Quotes

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

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.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

No man should be judge in his own case.

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.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

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.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

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

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.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.