In time, Mr Hall, one gets to recognize that sneer, that hardness, for fornication extends far beyond the actual deed. Were it a deed only, I for one would not hold it anathema. But when the nations went a whoring they invariably ended by denying God, I think, and until all sexual irregularities and not some of them are penal the Church will never reconquer England.
There's a difference between what I would like to have been and what I would have been. I always fantasized about being a reforming judge or prison governor (I think that the UK penal system is a disgrace) - but it's fantasy.
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
Slavery is not penal in character and planned by that law which commands the preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance.
The world is a penal institution.
Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged; men would walk more safely by day; every pillow would be more inviolate by night; property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure; all rational hopes respecting the future brightened.
Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but is serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment.
I don't know whether it's the finest public housing in America or the crown jewel of the American penal system.
In The Lost Message of Jesus I claim that penal substitution is tantamount to 'child abuse - a vengeful Father punishing his Son for an offence he has not even committed. ' Though the sheer bluntness of this imagery (not original to me of course) might shock some, in truth, it is only a stark 'unmasking' of the violent, pre-Christian thinking behind such a theology.
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilisation, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.
The education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention. [I]t is much easier to introduce and establish an effectual system. . . than to correct by penal statutes the ill effects of a bad system. . . . The education of youth. . . lays the foundations on which both law and gospel rest for success.
While I was in prison and wasn't a Muslim, I was indulging in all types of vice, right within the prison. And I never was ostracized as much by the penal authorities while I was participating in all of the evils of the prison, as they tried to ostracize me after I became a Muslim.
