It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
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.
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.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
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.
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.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
