Forced labor as a punishment is limited as to time and intensity. The convict retains his rights over his body; he is not absolute...ly tortured and he is not absolutely dominated. Banishment banishes only from one part of the world to another part of the world, also inhabited by human beings; it does not exclude from the human world altogether. Throughout history slavery has been an institution within a social order; slaves were not, like concentration-camp inmates, withdrawn from the sight and hence the protection of their fellow-men; as instruments of labor they had a definite price and as property a definite value. The concentration-camp inmate has no price, because he can always be replaced; nobody knows to whom he belongs, because he is never seen. From the point of view of normal society he is absolutely superfluous.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to w...hich you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning--"enemies of society," as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side.... Hell is not to love any more, madame. Not to love any more!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are un...fair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Utah is the only State that gives condemned men a choice between death by hanging or before a firing squad. Most prisoners prefer ...the firing squad, but one obstinate convict in 1912 elected to be hanged because "hanging is more expensive to the state."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Better to die, or not to have been born, than hear that plaining, piteous convict wail... about these beautiful dark eyebrowed women. It's soldiers who sing these days. O Lord God.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »