Miguel Bacaoco

“One cannot judge of crime with ready-made opinions: its philosophy is a little more complicated than people think. It is acknowledged that neither convict prisons, nor the hulks, nor any system of hard labour ever reformed a criminal. These forms of chastisement only punish him and reassure society against the offences he might commit.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

“Why is it that a convict never saves his money? Well, not only is it difficult for him to keep it, but prison life is so miserable that a man, of his very nature, thirsts for freedom of action. His position in society makes him so irregular a being that the idea of swallowing up his capital in orgies, of intoxicating himself with revelry, seems to him quite natural if only he can procure himself one moment's forgetfulness.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

“Man cannot exist without work, without legal, natural property. Depart from these conditions, and he becomes perverted and changed into a wild beast.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead or Prison Life in Siberia with an introduction by Julius Bramont

“Education has nothing whatever to do with moral deterioration; and if one must admit that it develops a resolute spirit among the people, that is far from being a defect.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead