Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.
Punishment is justice for the unjust.
Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Hanging is too good for him said Mr. Cruelty.
Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
Hold you there, neither a strange hand nor my own, neither heavy nor light shall touch my bum.
Let the punishment be proportionate to the offense.
It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.
Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?
Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to Heaven.
In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
Well, there's no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth.
Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.
One should not lift the rod against our enemies upon the private information of another.
Take away the danger and remove the restraint, and wayward nature runs free.
— Horace
Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.
Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.
Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.
Then I despair... I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.
No one provokes me with impunity.
All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
When God punishes a land, he deprives it leaders of wisdom.
If your buttocks burn, you know you have done wrong.
Many without punishment, none without sin.
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
The first and greatest punishment of the sinner is the conscience of sin.
— Seneca
Every guilty person is his own hangman.
— Seneca
There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.
— Seneca
And where the offence is, let the great axe fall.
Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.
If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.
We have found that morals are not, like bacon, to be cured by hanging; nor, like wine, to be improved by sea voyages; nor, like honey, to be preserved in cells.
He must have known me if he had seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face.
Next to the prosperity of a good person, I am best pleased with the confusion of a rascal.
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
The punishment of criminals should serve a purpose. When a man is hanged he is useless.
— Voltaire
Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.
One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.