Peter Kropotkin Quotes

Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.

I know what it's like to be ignored, and I think that is the big problem about the prison system: These people are being thrown away. There is no sense of rehabilitation. In some places, they are trying to do things. But, in most cases, it's a holding cell.

All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation.

We make no apology for people who should be in prison being in prison.

Prison … for the detention of persons and not for flagellating them or undermining their health.

Prison is not meant to be comfortable. It's not meant to be somewhere anyone would ever want to go back to.

The criminal left belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary.

Punishment can do a lot for criminals, and send a message to the rest of society.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for nothing; a man condemned to public works still serves the country, and is a living lesson.

It may seem a hard task to condemn fellow creatures to long years of confinement in prison, but it is not so hard if they clearly deserve it.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

And some people, you've got to lock up. If you don't, they're going to hurt you.

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.

Place all prisons near a high-road, where the suffering and disfigured offenders can be seen

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.

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

Prison works.

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

It is a huge asset to law and order that serious or persistent criminals should be taken out of the society on which they prey. It makes life safer for the law-abiding and on the whole prisons are pretty good at containing those who have been committed to them.

Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves.

Unfortunately, if the man who leaves the prison gates is just as likely or - as is sometimes grievously the case - more likely to offend as he was when he entered them, then we fail not only the individual but public safety as well.

It is shocking how much a day-care center is like a prison. They both have security cameras with walled exercise yards. Prisons are permanent day cares for people permanently in time-out - convicts.

I prefer a prison full of criminals than a graveyard full of innocent people.

Incarceration is supposed to keep the community safe from your behavior.

Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.